Productivity Versus Motivation in Adolescent Human Capital Production: Evidence from a Structurally-Motivated Field Experiment

Christopher Cotton, Brent Hickman (hickmanbr@wustl.edu), John List, Joseph Price (joseph_price@byu.edu) and Sutanuka Roy (sutanuka.roy5@googlemail.com)
Additional contact information
Brent Hickman: Washington University in St. Louis - Olin Business School
Joseph Price: Brigham Young University - Department of Economics
Sutanuka Roy: University of Chicago - Department of Economics, Australian National University

No 2020-150, Working Papers from Becker Friedman Institute for Research In Economics

Abstract: We leverage a field experiment across three distinct school districts to identify key pieces of a structural model of adolescent human capital production. Our focus is inspired by the contemporary psychology of education literature, which expresses learning as a function of the ratio of the time spent on learning to the time needed to learn. By capturing two crucial student-level unobservables—which we denote as academic efficiency (turning inputs into outputs) and time preference (motivation)—our field experiment lends insights into the underpinnings of adolescent skill formation and provides a novel view of how to lessen racial and gender achievement gaps. One general insight is that students who are falling behind their peers, whether correlated to race, gender, or school district, are doing so because of academic efficiency rather than time preference. We view this result, and others found in our data, as fundamental to practitioners, academics, and policymakers interested in designing strategies to provide equal opportunities to students.

Keywords: Adolescent human capital; field experiment; structural econometrics; psychology of education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 I21 I24 J22 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57 pages
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hrm
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Productivity Versus Motivation in Adolescent Human Capital Production: Evidence from a Structurally-Motivated Field Experiment (2023)
Working Paper: Productivity Versus Motivation in Adolescent Human Capital Production: Evidence from a Structurally-Motivated Field Experiment (2020)
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