Learning-by-Hardworking : A Structural Empirical Model of Effort Decisions of Students in Toulouse School of Economics

This paper proposes a structural approach to analyze a student’s decision-making mechanism, to quantify the effects of learning, and to determine its impacts on the final levels of achievement. Our two-period structural model highlights the trade-off between exerting efforts and learning incentives and predicts that an extra, preferably mid-term exam, may encourage students to study harder in the first half of a semester. To strengthen this prediction, we use the data from undergraduate students majoring in economics studying at the Toulouse School of Economics to estimate the model. The empirical analysis quantifies the impact of learning on a student’s grades