RHI Seminar: Pupils today, astronauts tomorrow? The impact of Italy’s 1962 school Reform on human capital accumulation

Abstract:

This paper investigates a major Reform that prompted the new construction and opening of middle schools (students aged 11-14) across Italy’s municipalities in 1962. Drawing on untapped historical sources, we construct a new municipal-level dataset on school infrastructure (opening of additional schools) and adult attainment rates (15+) plus a wide range of social, political, demographic and economic aspects. We compare attainment rates in municipalities that opened a middle school following the Reform with those that did not, based on a difference-in-differences (DiD) model. Since the selection into treatment was not completely exogenous, we augment the DiD model by using Propensity Score Matching (PSM). We find that the opening of new middle schools led to a positive premium equal to one percentage point on attainment rates in the span of a decade. Our results hold when testing for spillover effects and the influence of other confounding factors like migration.