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

Robert Metcalfe (), Simon Burgess () and Steven Proud ()

The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK

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)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2011-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab, nep-spo and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2011/wp276.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2011/wp276.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2011/wp276.pdf)

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:bri:cmpowp:11/276

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().