<mark>can improve educational attainment and thus have an associated effect on other social and environmental factors. This is further confirmed by Lleras‐Muney (2002; see also Grenet 2013) who shows that legally requiring children to attend school for one more year increased educational attainment by about 5 percent. Furthermore, the study uses data from the 1960, 1970, and 1980 U.S. censuses in conjunction with changes in compulsory schooling between 1915 to 1939 to</mark> establish that each year of additional schooling can reduce mortality by 3-6 percent.

<mark>Other researchers have used the onset of compulsory schooling law changes to estimate the returns to schooling in the República Bolivariana de Venezuela (Patrinos and Sakellariou 2005), the Netherlands (Levin and Plug 1999), Australia (Leigh and Ryan 2008), Sweden (Card 2001), Ireland (Callan and Harmon 1999), Türkiye (Patrinos, Psacharopoulos and Tansel 2021), the United States (Harmon and Walker 1995), for example. In Europe, Brunello, Fort and Weber (2009), using data from 12 European countries show that compulsory school reforms significantly affect educational attainment, especially among individuals belonging to the lowest quantiles of the distribution of ability. There is also evidence that additional education reduces conditional wage inequality, and that education and ability are substitutes in the earnings function. Aparicio and Kuehn (2017) use data from 31 European countries to find that educational attainment is a key factor for understanding why some individuals migrate and others do not. The authors suggest that individuals moving from low to medium part of the education distribution are less likely to migrate across countries for employment. Other uses of compulsory schooling laws to obtain causal estimates have been used in mortality studies (e.g., Albouy and Lequien 2009; Gathmann et al. 2015), health (e.g., Kemptner et al. 2011), crime (e.g., Bell et al. 2016), religion (e.g., Hungerman 2014), preferences (e.g., Yang 2021), and immigration (e.g., Cavaille and Marshall 2018).</mark>

# **<mark>3.4. Use of Compulsory Schooling Laws to Study the Impact on Environmental Behaviors</mark>**

<mark>There has recently been some interest in using regression discontinuity design with changes in compulsory schooling laws to analyze whether more schooling improves climate change literacy and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors later in life. Using the raising of school leaving age (ROSLA) law from September 1972 which increased school leaving age from 15 to 16 years in England as a natural experiment, Powdthavee (2021) shows that remaining in school because of the reform causally reduces people’s unwillingness to change their behaviors for the environment and their perception that climate change is too far in the future to worry. However, Powdthavee finds little evidence that more education improves the pro-environmental behaviors of those who were affected by the reform. This raises an important question of whether policies aimed at improving climate change awareness through education can effectively produce long-lasting</mark> changes in pro-environmental behaviors.

<mark>For Europe as a region, using a regression discontinuity design to instrument for educational attainment, Meyer (2015) uses changes in compulsory education laws in the 20</mark><sup>th</sup> <mark>century as a source of exogenous variation. Meyer finds strong evidence of a positive average treatment effect of increased education on pro-environmental behavior. Using two waves of Eurobarometer surveys, he finds a positive local average treatment effect for 7 of 8 pro-environmental behaviors. An analysis of related questions on the survey supports the notion that education causes individuals to be more concerned with social welfare and to accordingly behave in a more environmentally friendly manner (Meyer 2015). However, the study is restricted to 14 European countries where</mark> <mark>10</mark>