The effects of schooling on cognitive skills: evidence from education expansions

Lorenzo Cappellari, Daniele Checchi and Marco Ovidi

No 2023-03, LISER Working Paper Series from Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)

Abstract: We quantify the causal effect of schooling on cognitive skills across 21 countries and the full distribution of working-age individuals. We exploit exogenous variation in educational attainment induced by a broad set of institutional reforms affecting different cohorts of individuals in different countries. We find a positive effect of an additional year of schooling on internationally-comparable numeracy and literacy scores. We show that the effect is substantially homogeneous by gender and socio-economic background and that it is larger for individuals completing a formal qualification rather than drop-ping out. Results suggest that early and late school years are the most decisive for cognitive skill development. Exploiting unique survey data on the use of skills, we find suggestive evidence that our result is mediated by access to high-skill jobs.

Keywords: Cognitive skills; Educational Policies; Returns to schooling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H52 I21 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 56 pages
Date: 2023-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma, nep-neu and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://liser.elsevierpure.com/en/publications/the ... evidence-from-educat (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Effects of Schooling on Cognitive Skills: Evidence from Education Expansions (2023)
Working Paper: The effects of schooling on cognitive skills: evidence from education expansions (2022)
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:irs:cepswp:2023-03

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LISER Working Paper Series from Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) 11, Porte des Sciences, L-4366 Esch-sur-Alzette, G.-D. Luxembourg. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Library and Documentation ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).