Persistence of the School Entry Age Effect in a System of Flexible Tracking

In Germany, the streaming of students into an academic or nonacademic track at age 10 can be revised at later educational stages. To investigate the importance of such revisions, we use administrative data on the student population in one German state to measure the persistence of a randomly allocated disadvantage in the form of the school entry age’s impact on track attainment. Based on exogenous variation in the school entry age, we obtain regression discontinuity estimates for different cohorts. We show that the effect of school entry age on a student’s later attending grammar school disappears exactly at the grade level in which educational institutions facilitate track modification. JEL classification: I21, I28, J24