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

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  • Robert Metcalfe
  • Simon Burgess and Steven Proud

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.

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  • Robert Metcalfe & Simon Burgess and Steven Proud, 2011. "Student effort and educational attainment: Using the England football team to identify the education production function," Economics Series Working Papers 586, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:oxf:wpaper:586
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    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. The impact of poor scheduling of international football tournaments on English GCSE results
      by Economic Logician in Economic Logic on 2012-01-26 21:08:00

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    Cited by:

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    2. Niaz Asadullah & Alain Trannoy & Sandy Tubeuf & Gaston Yalonetzky, 2018. "Fair and unfair educational inequality in a developing country: The role of pupil’s effort," Working Papers 474, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
    3. Richard Duhautois & Bastien Drut, 2017. "Is work duration in France affected by football tournaments?," Economics and Business Letters, Oviedo University Press, vol. 6(1), pages 14-19.
    4. Beattie, Graham & Laliberté, Jean-William P. & Michaud-Leclerc, Catherine & Oreopoulos, Philip, 2019. "What sets college thrivers and divers apart? A contrast in study habits, attitudes, and mental health," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 178(C), pages 50-53.
    5. Burgess, Simon & Metcalfe, Robert & Sadoff, Sally, 2021. "Understanding the response to financial and non-financial incentives in education: Field experimental evidence using high-stakes assessments," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 85(C).
    6. Chadi, Adrian & de Pinto, Marco & Schultze, Gabriel, 2019. "Young, gifted and lazy? The role of ability and labor market prospects in student effort decisions," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 66-79.
    7. Sofia Izquierdo Sanchez & Caroline Elliott & Robert Simmons, 2016. "Substitution between leisure activities: a quasi-natural experiment using sports viewing and cinema attendance," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 48(40), pages 3848-3860, August.
    8. Beland, Louis-Philippe & Murphy, Richard, 2016. "Ill Communication: Technology, distraction & student performance," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 61-76.
    9. Holford, Angus, 2015. "Youth employment and academic performance: production functions and policy effects," ISER Working Paper Series 2015-06, Institute for Social and Economic Research.
    10. Kuehn, Zoe & Landeras, Pedro, 2012. "Study Time and Scholarly Achievement in PISA," Working Papers 2012-02, FEDEA.
    11. Tin-chun Lin & Subir Bandyopadhyay, 2019. "Are level of preparation and lecture attendance related in the role of influencing students' academic performance?," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 39(3), pages 2040-2051.
    12. Steven Proud, 2014. "Resits in Higher Education: Merely a Bar to Jump Over, or Do They Give a Pedagogical `Leg Up’?," Bristol Economics Discussion Papers 14/645, School of Economics, University of Bristol, UK.
    13. Brown, Alasdair & Yang, Fuyu, 2019. "The wisdom of large and small crowds: Evidence from repeated natural experiments in sports betting," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 288-296.

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    Keywords

    Student effort; Educational achievement; Schools;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity

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