Does Raising the School Leaving Age Reduce Teacher Effort? A Note from a Policy Experiment

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of an increase in the school leaving age on high school teachers’ absence behaviour. We estimate difference in difference models of absenteeism using count data approaches. Employing data from the Spanish Labour Force Survey, our findings suggest that high school teachers reduced their effort due to the reform that raised the age of compulsory education commencing in the academic year 1998-1999 in Spain. In particular, they take 15% more sickness absence in the posttreatment period. This result is robust to a variety of specifications, and should be of interest to both policy makers and researchers who rely upon compulsory school law changes as a source of exogenous variation in educational attainment.

Keywords: Absenteeism, Compulsory Schooling Laws, Count Data, Teachers

JEL Classification: J22, J38