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

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 Domenech (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.