How Much is Students’ College Performance Affected by Quantity of Study?

Recent educational reforms aim at improving school or college quality by improving students’ study incentives. However, surprisingly little is known about the effects of study on grade performance. This paper seeks to fill some of the gap by combining survey and administrative data from one Norwegian business school. A differences-in-differences approach exploiting within-student variation in effort within the same subject across two time periods is used to generate credible evidence. We find that grades are improved when students put in more effort. The estimated effects are of considerable size, although smaller than those reported by Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner (2008).