EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Educational Inequality and the Returns to Skills

Shelly Lundberg

No 2013-017, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: Research and policy discussion about the diverging fortunes of children from advantaged and disadvantaged households have focused on the skill disparities between these children-how they might arise and how they might be remediated. Analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health reveals another important mechanism in the determinants of educational attainment-differential returns to skills for children in different circumstances. Though the returns to cognitive ability are generally consistent across family background groups, personality traits have very different effects on educational attainment for young men and women with access to different levels of parental resources. These results are consistent with a model in which the provision of focused effort in school is complementary with parental inputs while openness, associated with imagination and exploration, is a substitute for information provision by educated parents and thus contributes to resilience in low-resource environments. In designing interventions to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children, we need to be cognizant of interactions between a child's skills and their circumstances.

Keywords: Education; inequality; personality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lma and nep-ltv
Note: IP
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Lundbe ... ional-inequality.pdf First version, 8/27/2013 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Educational Inequality and the Returns to Skills (2013) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hka:wpaper:2013-017

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jennifer Pachon ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:hka:wpaper:2013-017