Measuring educational attainment as a continuous variable: a new database (1970-2010)

In this paper, we introduce a new comprehensive data set on educational attainment and inequality measures of education for 142 countries over the period 1970 to 2010. Most of the previous attempts to measure educational attainment have treated education as a categorical variable, whose mean is computed as a weighted average of the official duration of each cycle and attainment rates, thus omitting differences in educational achievement within levels of education. This aggregation into different groups may result in a loss of information introducing, therefore, a potential source of measurement error. We explore here a more nuanced alternative to estimate educational attainment, which considers the continuous nature of the educational variable. This `continuous approach' allows us to impose more plausible assumptions about the distribution of years of schooling within each level of education, and to take into account the right censoring of the data in the estimation, thus leading to more accurate estimates of educational attainment and education inequality. These improved series may help to better understand the role of education on different socio-economic aspects, such as quality of life and human capital formation.