Schooling and Self-Control

Abstract

While there is an established positive relationship between self-control and education, the direction of causality remains a matter of debate. We make a contribution to resolving this issue by exploiting a series of Australian and German educational reforms that increased minimum education requirements as a source of exogenous variation in education levels. We find no evidence that an additional year of schooling increased the self-control of those people affected by the reforms, though our limited estimation power makes our estimates somewhat imprecise. Thus, while enhancing self-control through school-based interventions may be feasible, simply increasing the time early school leavers spend in formal education does not seem to meaningfully increase their self-control.