Education and Wartime Mobilization: Evidence from Colonial Korea during WWII

This study examines the effect of colonial education on the mobilization of Koreans during World War II. Considering an educational expansion policy that doubled the number of public primary schools in Korea, we employ a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits cross-regional variations in the expansion of primary schools and cross-cohort variations in exposure to school expansion. We show that the expansion of public primary education significantly increased the military mobilization of Koreans. Exploiting the design of the expansion policy, we use an instrumental variable approach and show that the results remain qualitatively unchanged. We discuss several potential mechanisms underlying our findings.