Virginity loss and academic performance

As this blog has a number of student readers the following paper might be of interest.

It appears that the negative effect of sex on academic performance is not as high as previously expected but is worse for males.

Conclusion: if you want to do well at school girls have to be sacrificed (not literally).

Think about your priors before reading the paper:

READING, WRITING, AND SEX: THE EFFECT OF LOSING VIRGINITY ON ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE

Controlling for a wide set of individual- and family-level observables available in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates show that sexually active adolescents have grade point averages that are approximately 0.2 points lower than virgins. However, when information on the timing of intercourse decisions is exploited and individual fixed effects are included, the negative effect of sexual intercourse disappears for females, but persists for males. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that while there may be adverse academic spillovers from engaging in intercourse for some adolescents, previous studies’ estimates are overstated due to unmeasured heterogeneity. (JEL I10, I21, I18)

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