The Cost of Grade Retention

Marco Manacorda ()

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: This paper uses administrative longitudinal micro data on the universe of Junior High school students in Uruguay to measure the effect of grade failure on students' subsequent school outcomes. Exploiting the discontinuity induced by a rule establishing automatic grade failure for pupils missing more than 25 days, I show that grade failure leads to substantial drop-out and lower educational attainment even after 4 to 5 years since the time when failure first occurred. Complementary evidence based on a change in the regime of grade promotion leads to very similar conclusions, suggesting that non-random sorting around the discontinuity point is unlikely to drive my results.

Keywords: grade retention; school drop-out; regression discontinuity; sorting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I22 J20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp0878.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Cost of Grade Retention (2010)
Working Paper: The cost of grade retention (2008)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp0878

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