Estimating the Causal Effect of Education on Discrimination -- CANCELLED

We use data from the UK British Social Attitudes Survey 1983-2009 to examine the effect of education on indicators of discrimination and racism. Importantly, we make use of the 1972 Raising of the School Leaving Age (RoSLA) reform to identify the causal effect that education may have on such indicators, using a regression discontinuity design. Our results show that naive OLS estimates describe a negative relation between education and discrimination (more education is related to lower levels of discrimination) whilst using the 1972 RoSLA events as an identifying mechanism suggests that education and discriminatory attitudes are not so connected as is commonly presumed. We comment on the implications of this result in light of contemporary educational policy reforms in Britain.