Hotter Days, Wider Gap: The distributional impact of heat on student achievement

Mika Akesaka and Hitoshi Shigeoka

Discussion papers from Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI)

Abstract: We demonstrate that heat disproportionately impairs human capital accumulation among low-performing students compared with their high-performing peers, using data from 22 million students who took nationwide examinations in Japan between 2007 and 2019. Given the strong correlation between academic performance and socioeconomic background, this suggests that heat exposure exacerbates pre-existing socioeconomic disparities among children. However, access to air conditioning in schools significantly mitigates these adverse effects across all achievement levels, with particularly pronounced benefits for lower-performing students. These findings suggest that public investment in school infrastructure can help reduce the unevenly distributed damage caused by heat to student learning.

Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2025-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rieti.go.jp/jp/publications/dp/25e024.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eti:dpaper:25024

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion papers from Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by TANIMOTO, Toko ().