Abstract
Sufficient human capital investment is crucial for the healthy growth of any national economy. Children accumulate knowledge, learning habits, communication ability, social skills, and leadership in school. Recent evidence has shed lights on the causal relationship between leadership and skills formation (Anderson and Lu, 2016) among those students who are intrinsically motivated to be a leader, future employers and policy makers might also be interested in the average effect of leadership education on academic performance, cognitive ability, non-cognitive ability and their social networks (eg., the number of friends or enemies, the relationship between the tutor and students). We investigate the question in a primary school in central China, with 33 classes and 2599 students covering grade 2 to 5 (8 to 11 years old). The control group adopts the conventional way to select the class leaders -- they are designated by the head teacher -- while students in the treatment group rotate to be the class leaders (class monitors, vice-monitors, Task commissaries) every two weeks. We expect the outcome variables in the treatment group to have a lower variation compared to the control group since the treatment has provided an equal access to the "leadership education".