Emilia Del Bono (ISER)

It is not how much you study but how and when: Estimating the production function of human capital at university (with Adeline Delavande and Angus Holford)

We introduce a new longitudinal survey of undergraduate students at a UK university. Controlling for detailed measures of students' expectations, aspirations and experimentally-elicited cognitive and non-cognitive traits, we identify the causal effects of different elements of university students' own study time and of attendance at lectures and classes on their first year academic performance. We show the most productive uses of time change depending on proximity to exams, though attendance at both lectures and classes throughout the year has a cumulative effect on end-of-academic-year performance. Controlling for cognitive and non-cognitive traits such as students' IQ, competitiveness, overconfidence and discount rates also results in substantial changes in measured ethnic, gender and socio-economic gradients in performance.