Does Attendance Affect Academic Performance? Evidence from 'G. D’Annunzio' University

This paper presents new evidence on the effects of class attendance on academic performance. We analyze survey data collected for an Introductory Macroeconomics course at “G. D’Annunzio” University of Chieti and Pescara (Italy) in the academic year 2004-2005, matched to administrative data. Using OLS "proxy variables" regressions to capture the effect of unobservable student factors correlated with attendance, we still find a positive and significant effect of attendance on academic performance. However, while the bias correction goes in the expected direction, when using panel data estimators to eliminate time-invariant individual specific unobservables, the attendance effect disappears