Abstract
This paper is the first to present an estimate of the relationship between compulsory schooling laws and school quality in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. To arrive at this estimate I use previously unused city-level data on pupil-teacher ratios, expenditures per pupil, length of school term, and attendance rates. My results indicate that compulsory schooling laws negatively affected school quality. This suggests that the effects of government policy to increase education levels during this period should be tempered since each year of education after the stricter laws were passed was of lower quality. Moreover, this negative relationship persisted for several years after the laws were passed. As an important aside, my results imply that returns-to-schooling estimates that use compulsory schooling law changes as an exogenous source of variation in educational attainment are potentially biased downwards.
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