Schooling and Self-Control

Deborah A. Cobb-Clark, Sarah C. Dahmann, Daniel A. Kamhöfer and Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2025, vol. 237, issue C

Abstract: While there is an established positive relationship between self-control and education, the direction of causality remains a matter of debate. We make a contribution to resolving this issue by exploiting a series of Australian and German educational reforms that increased minimum education requirements as a source of exogenous variation in education levels. We find no evidence that an additional year of schooling increased the self-control of those people affected by the reforms, though our limited estimation power makes our estimates somewhat imprecise. Thus, while enhancing self-control through school-based interventions may be feasible, simply increasing the time early school leavers spend in formal education does not seem to meaningfully increase their self-control.

Keywords: Self-control; Quasi-experiments; Compulsory schooling reforms; Brief Self-Control Scale (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C26 D90 I26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:237:y:2025:i:c:s0167268125002665

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107147

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