My academic paper on the ‘Behavioural Education Economics’ is now up on the web.  This will be a chapter in a forthcoming handbook on Behavioural Economics, due out Sep 2016.

ABSTRACT    The purpose of ‘Behavioural education economics’ is to understand the psychological factors influencing student performance and educational choices. One of the key insights of behavioural education economics is that educational decision making is characterised by choices which are usually not repeated and rely heavily on heuristics to solve complex choices in the absence of prior learning. At the heart of behavioural education economics is an understanding that academic outcomes are malleable. That investment decisions associated with education are primarily driven by non-cognitive behaviours and cognitive biases that affect participation in education and subsequently motivations to commit resources to these investments and maintain these choices over time. The focus of this paper will be on three key non-cognitive behaviours associated with choices in education that impact the quality of investments in education: self-control, self-efficacy and identity.

Leaver, S. 2016. Behavioural education economics. Routledge handbook of behavioral economics, ed. R. Frantz, S.-H. Chen, K. Dopfer, F. Heukelom, and S. Mousavi, 379–391.

An ungated version of the paper can be accessed here:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2634331