The impact of commuting time over educational achievement: A machine learning approach

Abstract

Taking advantage of georeferenced data from Chilean students, we estimate the impact of commuting time over academic achievement. As the commuting time is an endogenous variable, we use instrumental variables and fixed effects at school level to overcome this problem. Also, as we don’t know which mode of transport the students use, we complement our analysis using machine learning methods to predict the transportation mode. Our findings suggest that the commuting time has a negative effect over academic performance, but this effect is not always significant.