Am I missing something? The effects of absence from class on student performance

Wiji Arulampalam, Robin Naylor () and Jeremy Smith

The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) from University of Warwick, Department of Economics

Abstract: We exploit a rich administrative panel data-set for cohorts of Economics students at a UK university in order to identify causal effects of class absence on student performance. We exploit the panel properties of the data to control for unobserved heterogeneity across students and hence for endogeneity between class absence and academic performance of students stemming from the likely influence of effort and ability on both absence and performance. Our estimations also exploit features of the data such as the random assignment of students to classes and information on the timetable of classes, which provides potential instruments in our identification strategy. Among other results we find, from a quantile regression specification, that there is a causal effect of absence on performance for students : missing class leads to poorer performance. There is evidence that this is particularly true for better-performing students, consistent with our hypothesis that effects of absence on performance are likely to vary with factors such as student ability.

Keywords: Randomised experiments; quantile regression; selection correction; panel data; education; student performance; class absence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C41 I2 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-hrm and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Am I missing something? The effects of absence from class on student performance (2012)
Working Paper: Am I Missing Something? The Effects of Absence from Class on Student Performance (2008)
Working Paper: Am I missing something? The effects of absence from class on student performance (2007)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wrk:warwec:820

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