One possibility is that states in which saving rates are highest introduced mandatory education earlier than others did. The main defence is that a dummy in the individual savings regression for whether the state ever imposed compulsory education is not significant. The interpretation of this observation is that states that imposed mandatory education do not have different intrinsic saving rates relative to the others. This is only partially convincing in countering the argument that what might matter is not whether a mandate was imposed but when it was. Perhaps the timing of mandates is correlated with prior saving rates. In.
