Must Try Harder. Evaluating the Role of Effort in Educational Attainment

This paper is based on the idea that the effort exerted by children, parents and schools affects the outcome of the education process. We test this idea using the National Child Development Study. Our theoretical model suggests that the effort exerted by the three groups of agents is simultaneously determined as a Nash equilibrium, and is therefore endogenous in the estimation of the education production function. Our results support this, and indicate which factors affect examination results directly and which indirectly via effort; they also suggest that affecting effort directly has an impact on results.