Student effort and educational attainment: Using the England football team to identify the education production function

Robert Metcalfe () and Simon Burgess and Steven Proud
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Simon Burgess () and Steven Proud ()

No 586, Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: We use a sharp, exogenous and repeated change in the value of leisure to identify the impact of student effort on educational achievement. The treatment arises from the partial overlap of the world's major international football tournaments with the exam period in England. Our data enable a clean difference-in-difference design. Performance is measured using the high-stakes tests that all students take at the end of compulsory schooling. We find a strongly significant effect: the average impact of a fall in effort is 0.12 SDs of student performance, significantly larger for male and disadvantaged students, as high as many educational policies.

Keywords: Student effort; Educational achievement; Schools (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-eff, nep-hrm, nep-lab, nep-spo and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9ae71cf4-6ba4-4721-bdd2-da01559b857f (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Student effort and educational attainment: Using the England football team to identify the education production function (2011)
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:oxf:wpaper:586

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Pouliquen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).