New Publication on the long-term income effects of school statring age

The joint paper by Professors Kamila Cygan-Rehm and Matthias Westphal (FernUniversität in Hagen), titled "School Starting Age and the Gender Pay Gap Over the Life Cycle," was published online in the Journal of Applied Econometrics.

The paper highlights that school-entry cutoffs are not merely administrative rules; they can shape careers and gender gaps far beyond the first day of school. The paper contributes to the existing literature on the long-term effects of school starting age on labor-market trajectories by examining gender differences in these effects and their implications for gender gaps throughout one's lifetime. The life-cycle approach builds on and extends earlier evidence from Sweden by Fredriksson and Öckert (2014).

Using German administrative and survey data (NEPS), the authors demonstrate that there are negligible effects on men’s lifetime earnings for individuals born after the statutory school-entry cutoff; that is, those who start school later. For women, however, they find positive effects, especially between the ages of 25 and 35. These gender differences arise despite similar effects of a later school start on educational attainment. Instead, the evidence suggests that delayed childbirth and stronger labor-market attachment after the first birth are plausible mechanisms behind the positive effects for women.

Link to the full paper: Cygan-Rehm, K., & Westphal, M. School starting age and the gender pay gap over the life cycle. Journal of Applied Econometrics. DOI: 10.1002/jae.70095

Less technical summaries are available at:

• the IZA@LISER Network (in German): “Mehr als eine Frage der Schulreife: Wie Stichtage den Lebenslauf prägen”

Psychology Today (in English): “Born a Day Too Early?”