Educational attainment in the OECD, 1960–2010. Updated series and a comparison with other sources

•We construct series of educational attainment for 22 OECD countries during 1960–2010.•We compare different education data sets and find they often disagree with each other.•Our series compare favorably with others in terms of signal-to-noise ratios.•Barro and Lee's series are surprisingly volatile in some countries.•Successive revisions of different data sets seem to have increased their quality.

This paper describes the construction of updated series on the educational attainment of the adult population for a sample of 22 OECD countries covering the period 1960–2010. These series are then compared with (the OECD subsample of) the latest available version of other cross-country data sets on average years of schooling that are commonly used in the literature. Finally, statistical measures of the information content of the different series are constructed using the procedure developed by Krueger and Lindhal (K&L, 2001) and de la Fuente and Doménech (D&D, 2006). The exercise shows that there are important differences in quality across data sets and suggests that successive revisions have succeeded in increasing their signal to noise ratios.