Empirical evidence on the historical role of Compulsory Schooling Laws (CSL) for the spread of mass education is mixed at best. This is also due to the difficulty of identifying exogenous variation in the application of CSL. We exploit an almost unique feature of a CSL in 1877 Italy which was gradually implemented across municipalities based on the teacher to population ratio. This criterion generates a sharp discontinuity which can be exploited to estimate the causal effect of the early

Tag-uri: Italia