What is the cost of grade retention?

Asma Benhenda ()
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Asma Benhenda: University College London, Institute of Education

No 18-07, DoQSS Working Papers from Quantitative Social Science - UCL Social Research Institute, University College London

Abstract: This paper offers a new method to estimate the budgetary cost of grade retention that takes into account a) the impact of grade retention on students' school path; b) the dynamic impact of variations in grade retention on the flow of student enrolment across grades. Using administrative data on students in French secondary schools, I instrument retention by students' date of birth and find that the marginal impact of one year of retention is to increase the number of years of schooling by exactly one year. Modelling student enrolment with a discrete Markov chain model, I simulate a counterfactual scenario where grade retention is completely abolished. I find that budgetary savings increase only gradually and reach a steady state only when students who were entering primary school at the time of the abolition have left high school.

JEL-codes: I21 I22 J20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-ure
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