0.2 percentage points. This provides suggestive evidence that female students exert more effort to attend school as compared to their male counterparts.

Our overall findings are consistent with the education literature which has found some evidence for female students taking high stakes exams more seriously compared to their male peers (Brunello & Kiss, 2022). More specifically, evidence suggests that female students put in more time on homework compared to male students (Wagner, Schober, & Spiel, 2008), and that these results did not differ by grade among the sample of high school students (Xu, 2006).

# **6.4 Does school location affect students’ adaptation to higher temperatures?**

Response to temperature may vary based on region as humans adapt to their physical environment (or heat) and these adaptations reduce the performance losses associated with heat exposure. Medical research suggests that the “effect of heat acclimation on submaximal exercise performance can be quite dramatic, such that acclimated individuals can easily complete tasks in the heat that earlier were difficult or impossible” (P ́eriard, Racinais, & Sawka, 2015). Students from schools located in hotter areas might be better at adapting to higher temperatures as compared to the students who live in relatively colder areas. There is abundant evidence from high-income settings that hotter places have more physical infrastructure adaptations to high temperatures, such that the adverse effects of temperature on a variety of measures of human performance are reduced in these locations relative to their colder counterparts (Carleton et al., 2022; Heutel, Miller, & Molitor, 2021; Park & Behrer, 2017).

We test this adaptation hypothesis in Table 8 by dividing schools into quartiles depending on the mean number of days across years when their temperature exposure exceeds 30<sup>_◦_</sup> C. We find that heat has larger effects on test scores for students in schools located in colder regions (Column 1 of Table 8). The impact is smaller and/or statistically insignificant for the upper (hotter) quartiles.

Since the locations in the first three quartiles experience relatively low mean number of days where the temperature exceeds 30<sup>_◦_</sup> C, we divide the sample into two groups: the first three quartiles, and the fourth quartile. We present the results for this break up in Table 9. We find that the negative association between high temperatures and test scores is driven by the first three quartiles (schools in colder locations). In hotter regions, though the relationship between hot days and test scores is negative, it is statistically insignificant. These results of hotter regions being able to cope with heat better are consistent with the findings of Zhang et al. (in press).

It is not obvious what kinds of adaptation are leading to these reduced effects in hotter regions. Based on data from World Bank Group (2018), only 8% (11 out of 137 schools) of Ethiopian schools have any adoption of heat adaptation technologies including fans or evaporative air cooling, and air conditioning<sup>20</sup> . This suggests that mechanical cooling is

> 20Notably, this survey sampled the largest school in each location, implying that the true number of Ethiopian schools with cooling technologies might be even lower than 8%.

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