Impatience and academic performance : less effort and less ambitious goals

Using data from a sample of Italian undergraduate students, we find a negative relationship between time preferences and academic performance. We also find that impatient students, even those who were pretty sure, at the moment of enrollment, of being able to accomplish their degree within the regular time, are more likely to drop out or to be late in their educational career. Our results do not suffer from reverse causality problems and are robust controlling for a large number of individual characteristics, such as family income, cognitive abilities and risk aversion.