Harvard University and the NBER

200200007) on parts of our book, The Race between Education and Technology (Harvard Press 2008), which includes material on compulsory schooling in chapter 6. Adriana Lleras-Muney generously provided her data on compulsory schooling and child labor. Joshua Angrist and Daron Acemoglu kindly made available their coding of the laws, as did Stefanie Schmidt. We thank them all. We are grateful to Damon Clark, Ed Glaeser, Robert Willis, and participants in the Harvard Labor Workshop for helpful comments. In the three decades after 1910 the fraction of U.S. youths enrolled in public and private secondary schools soared from 18 to 71 percent and the fraction graduating increased from 9 to 51 percent. At the same time, state compulsory education and child labor legislation became more stringent. It might appear from the timing that the laws caused the increase in education rates. We evaluate that possibility using contemporaneous evidence on enrollments and also the micro-data from the 1960 census to examine the effect of the laws on overall educational attainment. Our estimation approach exploits cross-state differences in the timing of changes in state laws. The expansion of state compulsory schooling and child labor laws from 1910 to 193