This article analyzes the effect of grade retention in high school on later school outcomes in Italy. Grade retention is a strong signal of poor performance, so retained students should revise downwards their perceived probability of success in school. Grade retention also implies an increase in costs. Therefore, we expect a negative effect on future educational careers. However, the evidence from the existing literature is mixed. Using longitudinal administrative data, we propose a matching strategy to assess the impact of grade retention on institutional settings with considerable leeway in promotion/retention decisions. Following this strategy, we can interpret our results as estimates of the impact for students close to the threshold between retention and promotion. Our results add to the existing evidence that grade retention in high school has a negative impact on student’s educational outcomes by dramatically increasing dropout rates. Consistent with the compensatory advantage hypothesis, the negative effects are stronger for students with low educated or immigrant parents. Our findings suggest that alternatives to grade retention should be found to address underachievement.

中文翻译：

---

留守儿童。关于保留成绩对教育生涯的（不利）影响的新证据

本文分析了意大利高中成绩保留对以后学业成绩的影响。成绩保留是表现不佳的强烈信号，因此保留的学生应该下调他们在学校取得成功的感知概率。保留成绩也意味着成本的增加。因此，我们预计会对未来的教育事业产生负面影响。然而，现有文献的证据好坏参半。使用纵向管理数据，我们提出了一种匹配策略来评估保留成绩对机构设置的影响，并在晋升/保留决策方面有相当大的余地。遵循这一策略，我们可以将我们的结果解释为对接近保留和晋升阈值的学生的影响的估计。我们的研究结果进一步证明，高中成绩保留会对学生的教育成果产生负面影响，因为会大幅增加辍学率。与补偿优势假说一致，对于父母受教育程度较低或移民的学生来说，负面影响更大。我们的研究结果表明，应该找到保留成绩的替代方案来解决成绩不佳的问题。