Class Attendance and Academic Performance among Spanish Economics Students

This paper presents new evidence on the effects of class attendance on academic performance. We analyse survey data collected for an Introductory Econometrics Course at the Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Jurídicas of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, matched to administrative data. Using OLS-proxy regressions to control for unobservable student characteristics potentially correlated with attendance, we find a positive and significant effect of attendance on academic performance. However, the fact that instrumental variable regressions may be failing to account for the correlation not captured by the controls calls for further investigation based on panel data.