The Impact of State-Provided Education
Evidence from the 1870 Education Act
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9705083 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Benjamin Milner (University of Alberta), Brigid Milner (University of Alberta, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 135 |
| Issue | 671 |
| Pages | 2302-2337 |
| Publication date | 2025-09-24 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Economic Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-0133 • E-ISSN: 1468-0297 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ej/ueaf031 |
| OpenAlex | W4409577828 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 47 |
How does access to public education affect occupational outcomes and intergenerational mobility? The UK’s 1870 Education Act, which introduced a public education system in England and Wales, provides a unique historical context in which to explore these questions. Using newly digitised historical records, I find that the Act resulted in significant improvements in school supply and attendance, which in turn improved adult outcomes. In particular, analysis using a regression kink design suggests that public school access improved a child’s chance of obtaining an occupation requiring literacy in adulthood by as much as 17 percentage points. I use a triple difference specification to show that the effect extended to children further removed from the kink, and that the quality of occupational outcomes increased with each additional year of schooling. To study the reform’s effect on intergenerational mobility, I link father-son pairs across time, matching nearly 4 million individuals using full-count historical censuses. I find that, by targeting the lower classes, public school introduction significantly improved intergenerational mobility across numerous measures, with the adult outcome gap between high- and low-class children decreasing by over 10% in some cases
Economics · Education Act · Political science · Public economics · Special education · State (computer science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Computer Science · Law
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Automated Linking of Historical Data
The use of information about occupation
Robust Nonparametric Confidence Intervals for Regression-Discontinuity Designs
Regression discontinuity designs
Difference-in-differences with variation in treatment timing
Regression Discontinuity Designs in Economics
Das Human-Kapital
Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in Great Britain and the United States Since 1850
The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility II
Europe's Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses
Where is the land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States
Including Covariates in the Regression Discontinuity Design
The education act of 1870 as the start of the modern concept of the child
Trade unionists, artisans and the 1870 education act
Causal Impact of Having a College Degree on Women’s Fertility
A Nation of Immigrants
The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1209–2004
The Socioeconomic Return to Primary Schooling in Victorian England
A machine learning approach to improving occupational income scores
Religious controversy and the school boards 1870–1902
The conflict over the control of elementary education 1870–1902 and its effect upon the life and influence of the church
Does Educational Equality Increase Mobility? Exploiting Nineteenth-Century U.S. Compulsory Schooling Laws
American Mobility and the Expansion of Public Education
Literacy and the Industrial Revolution
Professor West on Early Nineteenth-Century Education
To the New World and Back Again
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2026 (3) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |