Prolonged Protests and Student Achievement: Evidence from Political Unrest in Thailand

This paper examines the impact of political protests on student achievement. The chief conceptual difficulty in identifying the effect of protests on student achievement is their non-random nature. To address this problem, I exploit the political protests in Thailand in 2008 and 2010 as quasi-experiments to measure their effect on the national examination, the O-NET, conditional on school fixed effects. The estimates suggest that the protests had a negative and significant effect on all test scores except for mathematics, perhaps because students were able to study mathematics more easily outside of school. The absolute sizes of the change in test score as a result of the protests range from 0.05 to 0.14 standard deviations, depending on the subject.