A new GLO Discussion Paper finds that living in a student room as a tertiary education student in Belgium (instead of commuting between one’s parental residence and college or university) does not affect exam results.

GLO Discussion Paper No. 885, 2021

Bye, bye, Hotel Mama, bye, bye good grades? Living in a student room and exam results in tertiary education – Download PDF
by Amez, Simon & Baert, Stijn

GLO Fellow Stijn Baert

Author Abstract: We study whether living in a student room as a tertiary education student (instead of commuting between one’s parental residence and college or university) affects exam results. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study this relationship beyond cross-sectional analysis. That is, we exploit rich longitudinal data on 1,653 Belgian freshmen students’ residential status and exam scores to control for observed heterogeneity as well as for individual fixed (or random) effects. We find that after correcting for unobserved heterogeneity, the association found in earlier contributions disappears. This finding of no significant impact of living in a student room on exam results is robust for other methods used for causal inference including instrumental variable techniques.

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GLO Discussion Papers are research and policy papers of the GLO Network which are widely circulated to encourage discussion. Provided in cooperation with EconStor, a service of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, GLO Discussion Papers are among others listed in RePEc (see IDEAS,  EconPapers). Complete list of all GLO DPs – downloadable for free.

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