The Effects of Relative Age on Early Childhood Academic Achievement: How They Differ Between Gender and Change Across Time
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Gary Becker argues that a person should make investments in human capital as early as possible because he will thereby maximize the period over which the investment pays out. Also, the pay out period will be less discounted, and a person's opportunity cost of time is lowest when he is young. However, this theory does not provide much guidance on what is the optimal age to enroll children in formal education. At that point, there are two concerns: (i) whether the child is learning more at home than he would at school and (ii) whether his age relative to his peers is such that he would learn more given his aptitude. Relative age has recently become a controversial issue because some parents now deliberately enrolled their children a year after they are eligible to start school, in the hope of giving them a permanent learning advantage. This is known as redshirting. There is little robust quantitative evidence on how relative age affects learning and whether the effects differ by gender or parents' education. I examine how relative age affects achievement using the nationally representative ECLS-K longitudinal survey. Because relative age could be endogenous to parents' observations of their child's maturity, I construct instrumental variables for relative age based on state-level policies of kindergarten entrance age cut-off dates. I find that the relative age has a positive effect from kindergarten through grade five in reading and from kindergarten through grade eight in math. I find little evidence of the permanent effect for which redshirting families hope. The relative age effect is greater for females and for children whose parents are more educated. The latter result suggests that children with more educated parents learn more at home than do other children.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 2012 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Zhong, Stephanie Yuechen |
|---|---|
| Primary advisor | Hoxby, Caroline M. |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Department of Economics |
Subjects
| Subject | Stanford Department of Economics |
|---|---|
| Subject | human capital investment |
| Subject | relative age effects |
| Subject | kindergarten entrance cutoff age policy |
| Subject | redshirting practice |
| Subject | early childhood academic achievement |
| Genre | Thesis |
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Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Zhong, Stephanie Yuechen. (2012). The Effects of Relative Age on Early Childhood Academic Achievement: How They Differ Between Gender and Change Across Time. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/ym834gx0910
Collection
Stanford University, Department of Economics, Honors Theses
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