The Impact of Truancy on Educational Attainment: A Bivariate Ordered Probit Estimator with Mixed Effects

This paper investigates the relationship between educational attainment and truancy. Using data from the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales, we estimate the causal impact that truancy has on educational attainment at age 16. Problematic is that both truancy and attainment are measured as ordered responses requiring a bivariate ordered probit model to account for the potential endogeneity of truancy. Furthermore, we extent the 'naïve' bivariate ordered probit estimator to include mixed effects which allows us to estimate the distribution of the truancy effect on educational attainment. This estimator offers a more flexible parametric setting to recover the causal effect of truancy on education and results suggest that the impact of truancy on education is indeed more complex than implied by the naïve estimator.