Why Don’t Struggling Students Do Their Homework? Disentangling Motivation and Study Productivity as Drivers of Human Capital Formation

Note: previous versions of this paper circulated under the title, “Disentangling Motivation and Study Productivity as Drivers of Human Capital Formation: Evidence from a Field Experiment and Structural Analysis.” Gregory Sun provided outstanding research assistance and invaluable feedback with the analysis. This paper benefited from many thoughtful discussions with Martin Luccioni, Sally Sadoff, Ismael Mourifié, Barton Hamilton, Stephen Ryan, Martin Garcia Vazquez, Nicholas Buchholz, Caroline Hoxby, Petra Todd, Jeffrey Smith, Chris Taber, Joseph L Mullins, Derek Neal, Angela Duckworth, Samuel Purdy, Aloysius Siow, Felix Tintelnot, Lydia Scholle-Cotton, Daphne Hickman, Morgan Hickman, Ariadne Merchant, and Nicholas Merchant, as well as seminar participants at several seminars and conferences. The field experiment would not have been possible without the help of the anonymous school administrators and teachers at our partner schools, as well as our team of talented and energetic research staff, including Andrew “Rusty” Simon, Joseph Seidel, Clark Halliday, No’am Keesom, Edie Dobrez, Diana Smith, Kristen Troutman, Wendy Pitcock, Matthew Epps, Janaya Gripper, Allanah Hoefler, Justin Holz, Kristen Jones, Tova Levin, Claire Mackevicius, and our student RAs, including Marvin Espinoza, Bonnie Fan, John Faughnan, Yuan Fei, Ian Fillmore, Greta Gol, Justin Guo, Colton Korgel, Hunter Korgel, Ethan Kudrow, Helen Li, Victor Ma, Claire Mackevicius, Janae Meaders, Mateo Portune, Denis Semisalov, Yaxi Wang, De’Andre Warren, Colleen White, and Colin Yu. We thank the editor, James Heckman, and four anonymous referees for feedback that helped improve this paper. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.