No Pass No Drive: Education and Allocation of Time

Abstract

More than one-third of all public high school students, majority being boys and blacks, dropout of school each year. This has put the question of how to spend educational resources in a cost-e¤ective way prominent on the research agenda. In this paper, we study the e¤ect of a large scale and low cost negative incentive policy, the No Pass No Drive (NPND) law, on education outcomes.Since the late 1980s, several U.S. states have introduced these laws that set minimum academic requirements for teenagers to obtain driving licenses. Using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) and Monitoring the Future (MTF), we exploit variation across state, time, and cohort to show that NPND laws led to a 6.4 percentage point increase in the probability of graduating from high school among black males. Further, we show that NPND laws were e¤ective in reducing truancy and increased time allocated to school-work at the expense of leisure and work.

Education, Crowding-out, and Black-White Employment Gaps in Youth Labor Markets: Evidence from No Pass, No Drive Policies

“…This is consistent with the mechanisms we discuss in our study, where "marginal dropouts" delay their dropout decision, at least temporarily, under Enrollment-based NPND policies. Barua and Vidal-Fernandez (2014) study NPND policies on a national level, looking at high school completion, completed grades, and some student time use outcomes. They find that years of schooling increased by 0.05, and the probability of graduating high school increased by 1 percentage point.…”

“…Enrollment-based policies require that teens remain in school and regularly attend (typically at least 90% attendance required) to legally hold a driver's license while under the age of 18. These policies have been shown by Kennedy (2020), Barua and Vidal-Fernandez (2014), and Krimmel (2000) to increase the likelihood that teens remain in school. We use difference-in-differences estimation to identify the effects of Enrollment-based policies on teen employment, exploiting the rollout of these policies over 20 states and 25 years.…”

The Unexpected Effects of No Pass, No Drive Policies on High School Education

“…My work has two clear advantages over that of Barua and Vidal-Fernandez (2014). First, I can identify the educational effects of these policies contemporaneously with their implementation.…”

“…2 Krimmel (2000) performs a time-series analysis of the initial rollout of these policies in Kentucky, finding that counties enacting NPND policies saw an 11 percent reduction in their dropout rate, while counties not enacting these policies only saw an 8 percent reduction. More closely related to my study is Barua and Vidal-Fernandez (2014), who focus on the effects of NPND policies nationwide on educational attainment and student time use. They show that students decrease leisure and work hours and increase time allocated to schoolwork.…”

“…3 Barua and Vidal-Fernandez (2014), due to their data structure, cannot examine how promotion and retention behavior changes within each grade level. They can only examine students' final educational attainment.…”