Education, earnings, and the 'Canadian GI bill'

Canadian Second World War veterans benefited from an extensive educational program similar to the U.S. G.I. Bill. Because of differences in military enlistment rates, however, a much lower fraction of Quebec men were eligible for these benefits than men from other provinces. Building on this fact, we analyse inter-cohort patterns of education and earnings for English-speaking men from Ontario, using French-speaking men from Quebec as a control group. We find that the instrumental variables estimates of the return to schooling are typically as big or bigger than the corresponding OLS estimates.