Impact of Length of the School Year on Student Performance and Earnings: Evidence From the German Short School Years

This article investigates how changing the length of the school year, leaving the basic curriculum unchanged, affects learning and subsequent earnings. I use variation introduced by the West German short school years in 1966-7, which exposed some students to a total of about two thirds of a year les...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Economic journal (London) Vol. 117; no. 523; pp. 1216 - 1242
Main Author Pischke, Jörn-Steffen
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford, UK Oxford, UK : Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.10.2007
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Blackwell Publishing
Oxford University Press
Subjects
Academic achievement
Elementary schools
Employment
Grade repetition
High school students
Impact analysis
Learning
Mathematics education
School year
Secondary school students
Secondary schools
Standard error
Students
Studies
Germany
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Summary:This article investigates how changing the length of the school year, leaving the basic curriculum unchanged, affects learning and subsequent earnings. I use variation introduced by the West German short school years in 1966-7, which exposed some students to a total of about two thirds of a year less of schooling while enrolled. I find that the short school years increased grade repetition in primary school and led to fewer students attending higher secondary school tracks. On the other hand, the short school years had no adverse effect on earnings and employment later in life.
Bibliography:http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2007.02080.x
I thank Fabian Waldinger for excellent research assistance. I thank Josh Angrist, David Autor, Jens Ludwig, Jack Porter, Justin Wolfers, referees for this Journal and for the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and participants at various seminars for helpful comments. I thank ZUMA Mannheim for their hospitality in allowing me access to the German Micro Census data. Some of the data used in this article have been obtained from the German Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung at the University of Köln (ZA). Neither the producers of the data nor the ZA bear any responsibility for the analysis and interpretation of the data in this paper. This paper was submitted before Jörn Steffen Pischke was invited to become an editor of the JOURNAL.
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ArticleID:ECOJ2080
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and participants at various seminars for helpful comments. I thank ZUMA Mannheim for their hospitality in allowing me access to the German Micro Census data. Some of the data used in this article have been obtained from the German Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung at the University of Köln (ZA). Neither the producers of the data nor the ZA bear any responsibility for the analysis and interpretation of the data in this paper. This paper was submitted before Jörn Steffen Pischke was invited to become an editor of the JOURNAL.
and for the
Journal
I thank Fabian Waldinger for excellent research assistance. I thank Josh Angrist, David Autor, Jens Ludwig, Jack Porter, Justin Wolfers, referees for this
Quarterly Journal of Economics
ISSN:0013-0133
1468-0297
DOI:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2007.02080.x