Improving the estimation of educational attainment: New methods for assessing average years of schooling from binned data

The accurate measurement of educational attainment is of great importance for population research. Past studies measuring average years of schooling rely on strong assumptions to incorporate binned data. These assumptions, which we refer to as the standard duration method, have not been previously evaluated for bias or accuracy.We assembled a database of 1,680 survey and census datasets, representing both binned and single-year education data....