Do second chances pay off? Evidence from a natural experiment with low-achieving students
利用希腊高校入学政策造成的分数门槛，研究低分学生重考对成绩和录取质量的影响，发现重考能显著提升成绩和获得更优的录取机会。
In several countries, students who fail high-stakes exams at the end of high school are faced with the choice of retaking or forgoing postsecondary education. We explore exogenous variation generated by a policy that imposed a performance threshold for admission into postsecondary education in Greece to estimate the effect of retaking exams on the exam performance and various measures of the quality of received offers. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and novel administrative data, we find that low-achieving students who retake national exams improve their performance by around 0.6 standard deviation. We also find that they obtain higher quality postsecondary offers, thanks to improved performance and more ambitious re-application choices.