“The Effect of High School Duration on Educational Attainment and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Ontario” (2018 - Job Market Paper) studies how high school duration affects students' further educational choices and labor market outcomes. We analyze a policy change in Ontario, Canada, which reduced the duration of high-school from five to four years. First of all, using difference in differences analysis, we show that the policy decreased the high school graduation rate by 0.1 p.p. Conditional on graduating from high school, shortened school length increased immediate enrollment into university, by 3 p.p., and college enrollment with a one year delay starting one year after, by 5 p.p.. The increased enrollment in postsecondary education is offset by increases in dropout rates, leaving the educational attainment distribution unchanged when measured at age 28-29. When it comes to wages, there is approximately a 5 to 10 p.p. penalty conditional on educational level for those who have at least graduated from high school. We propose two possible explanations for this: a composition effect due to misallocation of individuals into educational levels, brought on by a decrease in how informed students are about their ability ("orientation effect") and a wage rate decrease due to a decrease in human capital accumulation ("performance effect"). In order to disentangle both channels and assess their relative importance, we propose a dynamic structural discrete choice model of education, in which students learn their ability. We find that the orientation effect accounts for 5% to 31% of the decrease in the average wage premia across educational categories. The remaining difference is explained by wage rate decreases. In terms of the distribution of educational attainments, the orientation effect induces students to insure themselves against uncertainty in their ability by choosing college educations at higher rates. This effect is offset by decreases in college wage rates.
“How Does a Reduction in High School Length Affect Students’ Performance?" Evidence from an Educational Reform in Ontario” (2018), studies the impact of high school duration on students’ academic progress within high school. Using the Survey of Labor Income Dynamic (SLID) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youths (NLSCY), I compare the difference between pre- and post-reform cohorts in Ontario with those in the rest of Canada to identify the policy effect on student performance. I examine the effectiveness of the policy by exploring its impact on high school duration, course failure rate, graduation rates as well as students’ cognitive performance. The estimates demonstrate that, on average, students spend 0.4 fewer years in high school. Although the overall learning process seems more efficient, there is a polarization of outcomes. The portion of low ability students ever failing a math course increases by 13 p.p. and the high school graduation rate is reduced by 0.1 p.p. Moreover, the negative impact on students with lower ability persists. When measured at age 21 and 22, their numeracy skill is 0.2 standard deviations lower compared to cohorts educated in the old system. At the same time, the numeracy skills of higher ability students increased by 0.2 standard deviations.
“Cohort Size and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from a Quasi-experiment” (in progress), analyzes the impact of a labor supply shock on employees’ labor market outcomes. A result of the Ontario educational reform to reduce high school length was the creation of a “double cohort”: the last cohorts educated in the old system and the first new cohorts in the new structural of secondary school, both of who graduated from high school in 2003. This sudden exogenous increase in the cohort size provides an opportunity to measure the impact of the labor supply without the confounding effects of unobserved demand trends. Morin (2015) documents that the increased cohort size induces significant negative impacts on high school graduates’ weekly wage when measured about six months after high school graduation. Using rich up-to-date data provided by the Labor Force Survey, Census (2006, 2011, 2016), and Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamic Database, I further examine whether this negative impact on high school graduates persists in the long run. In addition, by comparing the differences in wages between recent university graduate workers and those with the same education level but different experience across provinces and across time, I estimate the impact of labor supply shock on labor market outcomes among university graduates. These empirical findings shed some light on the elasticity of substitution between workers with different experience within the same education level in the Ontarian labor market.