PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Elizabeth U. Cascio
AU  - Ethan G. Lewis
TI  - Schooling and the Armed Forces Qualifying Test
AID  - 10.3368/jhr.XLI.2.294
DP  - 2006 Mar 31
TA  - Journal of Human Resources
PG  - 294--318
VI  - XLI
IP  - 2
4099  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/XLI/2/294.short
4100  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/XLI/2/294.full
SO  - J Hum Resour2006 Mar 31; XLI
AB  - How much can late schooling investments close racial and ethnic skill gaps? We investigate this question by exploiting the large differences in completed schooling that arise among teenagers with birthdays near school-entry cutoff dates. We estimate that an additional year of high school raises the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) scores of minorities in the NLSY 79 by 0.31 to 0.32 standard deviations. These estimates imply that closing existing racial and ethnic gaps in schooling could close skill gaps by between 25 and 50 percent. Our approach also uncovers a significant direct effect of season of birth on test scores, suggesting that previous estimates using season of birth as an instrument for schooling are biased.