Does a good mark affect the well-being of students?
Individuals as well as firms and governments have widely acknowledged the role of education in building human capital and helping to signal the otherwise unobserved ability of individuals as the emphasis that they place on education and training programs suggests. However, a sharp increase in interest in the role of education in shaping individuals’ well-being or civic behaviour by policy makers has so far only found mixed evidence. In this paper I estimate the effect of using achievement labels in school tests eg, Bad, Fair, Good, Very Good, on a measure of well-being given by the event of a police contact or visit to parents due to the behaviour of children in UK secondary schools. I give causal interpretation to the estimates by employing a research design that exploits discontinuities in test scores. I find that a jump from a low to a high achievement level decreases the probability of a police contact by four percentage points. Under the identifying assumptions OLS estimates are u
