Anne Marie is a PhD student in Economics whose research lies at the intersection of health and education. Her work uses Danish administrative data and quasi-experimental methods to study how institutional features of the education system - such as school starting age and academic redshirting - affect children’s health outcomes and educational inequality in primary school.
Her study, that she will present at this CREATE seminar, examines how changes in school entry policies shape disparities in ADHD outcomes and what this implies for understanding age-related differences in diagnosis and treatment. She writes:
"I study how changes in parental discretion over school starting age (academic redshirting) affect gaps in ADHD referral, diagnosis, and treatment between young- and old-for-grade children. I exploit a tightening of redshirting rules in Denmark combined with quasi-experimental variation in school starting age from the school entry cutoff. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, I find that gaps in ADHD referral, diagnosis, and treatment increased from negligible up to 1 percentage point (18% of the mean) for boys after the policy change. For girls, who were less likely to be redshirted and therefore less exposed to the tightening, substantial but imprecise gaps were present before the policy change and did not change after. This suggests that academic redshirting mitigates disparities in ADHD outcomes and points to possible overdiagnosis of young-for-grade children, underdiagnosis of old-for-grade children, or both when redshirting is less available."