School Entry Cutoff Date and the Timing of Births

Abstract

I examine how the timing of births responds to school entry cutoff date. Many countries require children to reach a certain age by a specified date in the calendar year in order to start kindergarten/primary school. There is a clear trade-off for parents to time a birth after the school entry cutoff date; births just after cutoff date may benefit children from being older among the school cohort, which is shown to provide the children with academic advantage, while parents have to bear an additional year of child care costs. Using the universe of births during 1974– 2010 in Japan, I find that more than 1,800 births per year are shifted roughly a week before the cutoff date to a week following the cutoff date. The overall shifts in births, however, may mask heterogeneous responses of mothers. In fact, I find that mothers with low-skilled jobs (and hence low-income) tend to give more births before the school entry cutoff date while mothers with medium- and high-skilled jobs give births after the cutoff date. These findings imply that a very common rule set by the government made children born just before the cutoff date suffer from “double” deficits, which may potentially contribute to intergenerational immobility. This study may also have implications for growing literature that assumes births around the school entry cut-off dates are random.