Osaka Workshop on Economics of Institutions and Organization (#154)

Does Yutori (relaxed) education could lead to better or worse labor market outcomes? By comparing the people born in the same year but have different lengths of exposure to the relax-oriented curriculum in the 1980s, this paper studies the impact of Japanese curriculum-reducing scholastic ability on people’s labor market performance. We discover that individuals exposed to more years of relaxed education had less favorable results (i.e., lower earnings, higher probability of being unemployed, and lower probability of obtaining full-time occupation). The mechanism of their poor performance includes lower educational attainment. Our results hold up after excluding other explanations and are robust under various sensitivity testing.Abstract：Ryuichi Tanaka