Abstract
Recent scholarship has argued that structure - forced, frequent, and regular attendance e.g. - may be good for academic performance in higher education. We draw on a natural experiment at a large university to estimate the causal effect of a full year of forced, frequent, and regular attendance on academic performance, and find no evidence for positive effects. Our evidence instead implies students have lower grades and less leisure, both because of direct effects of the policy and because of spillovers on performance in other courses. The policy has enduring effects, as students have lower grades later on, even after regaining discretion over their attendance.
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Host: Manudeep Bhuller