on students using data from a high-stakes exam in a low-income country. More specifically, we examine the relationship between high temperatures and learning outcomes in Ethiopia, with a focus on the national high stakes university entrance exam, the Ethiopian Higher Education Entrance Certificate Examination (EHEECE).

The EHEECE is a critical exam that determines access to higher education and can have important long-term implications for individuals’ educational attainment and future labor market outcomes. It determines whether or not students can enroll in undergraduate universities, as well as the undergraduate university in which they enroll. Students who fail the exam usually take up vocational jobs, informal jobs, or work in agriculture; those who pass the exam have the opportunity to take up blue-collar and white-collar jobs, which generally offer higher wages and benefits. The stakes of these exams are high.

We investigate the impact of high temperatures over the school year leading up to the exam, which we will henceforth refer to as the exam year, on the exam performance of 12<sup>_th_</sup> grade students in Ethiopia. We present three main findings.

First, exposure to high temperatures during the exam year is associated with poorer performance on exams. These impacts are weakly driven by hot days during the school year as compared to hot days during the winter and summer breaks. On the other hand, unlike the findings from India (Garg et al., 2020), in our setting, we do not find the predominant channel to be hot days that fall during the agricultural growing season. We discuss this result further in the mechanisms section of this paper.

Second, we find evidence of heterogeneity by gender in impacts of heat on exam performance. While, at baseline, women in our sample have significantly lower test scores relative to men, we present suggestive evidence that high temperatures have a smaller adverse impact on women’s scores. The current body of literature has not revealed consistent differential effects of temperature on test performance based on gender (Cho, 2017; Park et al., 2020). In contrast to the existing research, our study demonstrates heterogeneous effects based on gender.<sup>3</sup> Third, we find that students from schools located in hotter regions are better able to cope with higher temperatures compared to their peers who are located in relatively cooler regions. The negative relationship between heat and learning that we find in our study is primarily driven by students in cooler regions. This disparity in impact could be attributed to either physiological adaption or acclimatization to higher temperatures by students in hotter regions (Sexton, Wang, & Mullins, 2022) or due to greater use of climate adaption technologies in hotter regions. Negligible adoption of cooling technologies in Ethiopian schools makes us believe that this is suggestive evidence of heat acclimatization. The rest of the paper is structured as follows. The next section describes the context for find that the negative impacts are highest for children whose household heads have attained at least secondary school education. These results are similar to Randell and Gray (2016) who find that early childhood exposure to high temperatures is negatively associated with the likelihood of completing an additional year of schooling in rural Ethiopia.

> 3Graff Zivin et al. (2020) find that heat has more significant impacts in social science (or the arts track), characterized by a relatively higher proportion of women. They suggest that the effects they document might be driven by changes in women’s scores due to their propensity to feel more stressed.

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