Abstract
Education has been recognized as a key protective factor against cognitive aging. We examine this causal link of early life education to late-life cognitive ability, by exploiting compulsory education laws. There are handful of papers examining the effects of compulsory education on educational attainment on late-life cognition in the U.S. and Europe. Building on this literature, we examine the effects of compulsory education laws on late-life cognition in non-Western countries and compare that with the effects in Western countries. We also examine the potential role of compulsory education laws on reducing gender difference in late-life cognition. In several recent studies suggest that women in developed countries cognitively perform at least as good as men or better, while women in developing countries consistently perform worse than men. We hypothesize that compulsory education laws have reduced gender differences in educational attainment and consequently, reducing gender differences in late-life cognition.