Are Students' Goals, Grades and Fights Influenced by Friday Night Lights?

We leverage within-school variation to estimate the effects of football team performance using a panel of U.S. public high schools in the 2009–2017 academic years. We find no negative effects of athletic success on the academic performance and antisocial behaviour of high school students. Moreover, we find that greater athletic success increases university aspirations of high school students. The estimates show that a one-standard-deviation increase in a team’s winning percentage increases SAT/ACT test taking and AP course enrolment by 0.18 and 0.14 percentage-points respectively, consistent with a positive effect on university aspiration. Ancillary analysis shows a specific negative association between the magnitude of effects and school size which would arise when the effects of success are mainly driven by athletes. Robustness checks confirm the effects of athletic success are not likely biased because of endogeneity from measurement errors or confounding trends