Survey Attrition and Schooling Choices

We use data from three cohorts of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience and from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to study the effect of survey attrition on estimates of statistical models of schooling choices. We estimate regressions using data on people who always respond to the surveys (stayers) and on people who miss some surveys (attritors) and test whether the same statistical model describes the behavior of stayers and attritors. In general (with a few exceptions) we find that attrition either has no effect on the regression estimates or only affects the estimates of the intercept (and sometimes the coefficients of birth year dummies) and does not affect estimates of family background slope coefficients.