Ageing and Skills: The Case of Literacy Skills

Garry Barrett and W. Craig Riddell

No 12073, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The relationship between ageing and skills is of growing policy significance due to population ageing, the changing nature of work and the importance of literacy for social and economic well-being. This article examines the relationship between age and literacy skills in a sample of OECD countries using three internationally comparable surveys. By pooling the survey data across time we can separate birth cohort and ageing effects. In doing so we find literacy skills decline with age and that, in most of our sample countries, successive birth cohorts tend to have poorer literacy outcomes. Therefore, once we control for cohort effects the rate at which literacy proficiency falls with age is much more pronounced than that which is apparent based on the cross-sectional relationship between age and literacy skills at a point in time. Further, in studying the literacy-age relationship across the skill distribution in Canada we find a more pronounced decline in literacy skills with age at lower percentiles, which suggests that higher initial literacy moderates the influence of cognitive ageing.

Keywords: literacy; cognitive skills; ageing; human capital; cohort effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J14 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2019-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published - published in: European Journal of Education, 2019, 54 (1), 60-71

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp12073.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:iza:izadps:dp12073

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().