Convergence of educational attainment levels in the OECD: More data, more problems?

This note shows that the dynamics of the dispersion of educational attainment across OECD countries in the period 1960–1990 differ enormously depending on the dataset used, as do the results of the test of significance in the change of the cross-country standard deviation of schooling years between subperiods. The three datasets studied (the classical Barro–Lee dataset and the recent Cohen–Soto and de la Fuente–Domenech datasets) provide contradictory conclusions on both the existence and evolution of convergence in educational attainment for industrialized countries.