EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Why Don't Struggling Students Do Their Homework? Disentangling Motivation and Study Productivity as Drivers of Human Capital Formation

Christopher Cotton, Brent Hickman, John List, Joseph Price and Sutanuka Roy

Framed Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website

Abstract: Using field-experimental data (study-time tracking and randomized incentives), we identify a structural model of learning. Student effort is influenced by external costs/benefits and unobserved heterogeneity: motivation (willingness to study) and productivity (conversion rate of time into skill). We estimate academic labor-supply elasticities and skill technology. Productivity and motivation are uncorrelated. Low productivity, not low motivation, is the stronger predictor of academic struggles. School quality augments productivity and accelerates skill production. We find that dynamic skill complementarities arise mainly from children's aging and from a feedback loop between investment activity and productivity, rather than from carrying forward past skill stocks.

Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://s3.amazonaws.com/fieldexperiments-papers2/papers/00826.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Why Don’t Struggling Students Do Their Homework? Disentangling Motivation and Study Productivity as Drivers of Human Capital Formation (2025) Downloads
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:feb:framed:00826

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Framed Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Franco Daniel Albino ().

 
Page updated 2025-10-03
Handle: RePEc:feb:framed:00826