Religious practice and student performance: Evidence from Ramadan fasting

The resulting variation of daily fasting time for Muslim believers during Ramadan can be seen as exogenous in the context of schooling and therefore provides an ideal source to analyze the eect of religious engagement as measured by the intensity of observance of the religious practice. [...] To provide more evidence on the relative importance of the two channels, formation of character skills and formation of social capital, we rely on the religious composition of school-cohorts in the PISA data. [...] This theory highlights the importance of the social environment of students in the context of schooling and predicts that the creation of a more unied school community increases the skill formation of students. [...] To facilitate the interpretation of our estimations, we rescale test scores of each wave to the mean and standard deviation of the test scores of the rst wave. [...] To ease the interpretation of our estimates, we dene Shareict to be 1 if the share of Muslim students in the school of student i is above the median of the conditional distribution of the share of Muslim students in schools of 36 country c and year t given a positive share of Muslim students in school and zero otherwise.