eng Does grade retention affect achievement? Some evidence from PISA Garcia-Pérez, J. Ignacio Hidalgo-Hidalgo, Marisa Robles-Zurita, José Antonio Xarxa de Referència en Economia Aplicada (XREAP) info:eu-repo/semantics/workingPaper Xarxa de Referència en Economia Aplicada (XREAP) 2011 Academic achievement Programme for International Student Assessment Rendiment acadèmic http://ddd.uab.cat/record/98106 oai:www.recercat.cat:2072/172874 oai:ddd.uab.cat:98106 Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús de Creative Commons, amb la qual es permet copiar, distribuir i comunicar públicament l'obra sempre que se'n citin l'autor original, la universitat i la xarxa i no se'n faci cap ús comercial ni obra derivada, tal com queda estipulat en la llicència d'ús http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/es/ Grade retention practices are at the forefront of the educational debate. In this paper, we use PISA 2009 data for Spain to measure the effect of grade retention on students’ achievement. One important problem when analyzing this question is that school outcomes and the propensity to repeat a grade are likely to be determined simultaneously. We address this problem by estimating a Switching Regression Model. We …find that grade retention has a negative impact on educational outcomes, but we confi…rm the importance of endogenous selection, which makes observed differences between repeaters and non-repeaters appear 14.6% lower than they actually are. The effect on PISA scores of repeating is much smaller (-10% of non-repeaters’ average) than the counterfactual reduction that non-repeaters would suffer had they been retained as repeaters (-24% of their average). Furthermore, those who repeated a grade during primary education suffered more than those who repeated a grade of secondary school, although the effect of repeating at both times is, as expected, much larger.