Do environmental factors affect student performance? Understanding the skill development process also provides opportunities to enhance skill development. Policymakers are deliberating on how to remedy the insufficient mastery of basic skills by a large proportion of individuals. Following on the framework of Kautz et al. (2014), they could intervene in several life stages and their interventions could target varying factors important for skill formation, such as prenatal investments or parenting. As suggested by Kautz et al. (2014), one of the factors that policymakers could target is the environment. This dissertation addresses whether environmental factors, more specifically temperature, affect student performance. The temperature on Earth has increased over the past years, also in Europe. The rate of global warming in Europe is twice as fast as the global average (KNMI, 2021), while research on the effects of temperature on skill development in Europe is lacking. The fifth chapter of this dissertation closes this gap in the literature. It provides policymakers with information on whether temperature matters for test scores of students, and thus whether improving students’ thermal environment could enhance their performance. 9
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