No Pass No Drive: Education and Allocation of Time

Around one-third of students in the United States, mostly boys and blacks, fail to graduate from high school each year. Since the late 1980s, several states have introduced minimum academic requirements for teenagers to obtain driver’s licenses. Using data from the American Community Survey, we find that these so-called No Pass No Drive laws have a positive and significant effect on high school completion and educational attainment among males and blacks, but not among females. Data from Monitoring the Future suggest that students who remained in school increased time allocated to schoolwork at the expense of leisure and work hours.