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Author: Lewis, Ethan Gatewood
Resulting in 3 citations.
1. Cascio, Elizabeth Ulrich
Lewis, Ethan Gatewood
Schooling and the AFQT: Evidence From School Entry Laws
Working Paper No. 05-1, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, January 2005.
Also: http://www.phil.frb.org/files/wps/2005/wp05-1.pdf; Also IZA Discussion Paper No. 1481.
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
Keyword(s): Age at School Entry; Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB); I.Q.; Racial Differences; Schooling; Tests and Testing

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Is the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) a measure of achievement or ability? The answer to this question is critical for drawing inferences from studies in which it is employed. In this paper, we test for a relationship between schooling and AFQT performance in the NLSY 79 by comparing test-takers with birthdays near state cutoff dates for school entry. We instrument for schooling at the test date with academic cohort—the year in which an individual should have entered first grade—in a model that allows age at the test date to have a direct effect on AFQT performance. This identification strategy reveals large impacts of schooling on the AFQT performance of racial minorities, providing support for the hypothesis that the AFQT measures school achievement.
Bibliography Citation
Cascio, Elizabeth Ulrich and Ethan Gatewood Lewis. "Schooling and the AFQT: Evidence From School Entry Laws." Working Paper No. 05-1, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, January 2005.
2. Cascio, Elizabeth Ulrich
Lewis, Ethan Gatewood
Schooling and the Armed Forces Qualifying Test: Evidence from School-Entry Laws
The Journal of Human Resources 41,2 (Spring 2006): 294-318.
Also: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40057277
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Keyword(s): Age at School Entry; Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Ethnic Differences; High School; Minorities; Racial Differences; School Entry/Readiness; Schooling; State-Level Data/Policy

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 NLSY79 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.
Bibliography Citation
Cascio, Elizabeth Ulrich and Ethan Gatewood Lewis. "Schooling and the Armed Forces Qualifying Test: Evidence from School-Entry Laws." The Journal of Human Resources 41,2 (Spring 2006): 294-318.
3. Lewis, Ethan Gatewood
Essays in Labor and Trade
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California - Berkeley, 2003. DAI-A 64/09, p. 3417, Mar 2004
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning
Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Census of Population; Labor Market Surveys; Modeling; Schooling; Skills; Tests and Testing

This volume contains two essays. The first evaluates models of the labor market consistent with the fact that relative wages and employment rates are unresponsive to local factor supplies in comparisons across US local labor markets. Whether relative supply changes are exported from local markets embodied in goods or adapted to through changes in production technology is evaluated by estimating the effect of the growth of different types of labor on the growth of different industries, and on the relative utilization of the types within industries. Exogenous changes in worker mix are identified from the historical regional settlement patterns of immigrants from different countries, and from the Mariel boatlift. Using output data from Annual Surveys of Manufacturers, augmented with employment and labor force data from Censuses of Population, changes in local labor mix during the 1980s are shown to have had little influence on local industry mix. Instead, consistent with models of directed technical change (Acemoglu (1998)) increases in the local relative supply of a skill group leads to an increase in its employment intensity within industries, with little or no effect on its relative wages. The second essay investigates the extent schooling enhances labor market skills. Controlling for performance on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT)--available for most respondents to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY)--reduces estimates of the return to schooling in wage regressions, leading some to argue it measures a fixed e age and arguably innate ability. The discontinuity of grade level in birthday is used to show that a year of schooling improves AFQT performance of the youngest NLSY respondents by 0.1 standard deviations.
Bibliography Citation
Lewis, Ethan Gatewood. Essays in Labor and Trade. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California - Berkeley, 2003. DAI-A 64/09, p. 3417, Mar 2004.