We evaluate the impact on earnings, pensions, and further labor market outcomes of two parallel educational reforms increasing instructional time in Swedish primary school. The reforms extended the annual term length and compulsory schooling by comparable amounts. We find striking differences in the effects of the two reforms: at 5%, the returns to the term length extension were at least half as high as OLS returns to education and benefited broad ranges of the population. The compulsory schooling extension had small (2%) albeit significant effects, which were possibly driven by an increase in post-compulsory schooling. Both reforms led to increased sorting into occupations with heavy reliance on basic skills.

\\{Intervening on modifiable risk factors to prevent dementia is of key importance, since progress-modifying treatments are not currently available. Education is inversely associated with dementia risk, but causality and mechanistic pathways remain unclear. We aimed to examine the causality of this relationship in Sweden using, as a natural experiment, data on a compulsory schooling reform that extended primary education by 1 year for 70\% of the population between 1936 and 1949. The reform introduced substantial exogenous variation in education that was unrelated to pupils’ characteristics. We followed 18 birth cohorts (n = 1,341,842) from 1985 to 2016 (up to ages 79–96 years) for a dementia diagnosis in the National Inpatient and Cause of Death registers and fitted Cox survival models with stratified baseline hazards at the school-district level, chronological age as the time scale, and cohort indicators. Analyses indicated very small or negligible causal effects of education on dementia risk (main hazard ratio = 1.01, 95\% confidence interval: 0.98, 1.04). Multiple sensitivity checks considering only compliers, the pre-/post- design, differences in health-care-seeking behavior, and the impact of exposure misclassification left the results essentially unaltered. The reform had limited effects on further adult socioeconomic outcomes, such as income. Our findings suggest that without mediation through adult socioeconomic position, education cannot be uncritically considered a modifiable risk factor for dementia.}

We investigate two parallel school reforms in Sweden to assess the long-run health effects of education. One reform only increased years of schooling, while the other increased years of schooling but also removed tracking leading to a more mixed socioeconomic peer group. By differencing the effects of the parallel reforms, we can separate the effect of de-tracking and peers from that of more schooling. We find that the pure years of schooling reform reduced mortality and improved current health. Differencing the effects of the reforms shows significant differences in the estimated impacts, suggesting that de-tracking and subsequent peer effects resulted in worse health.