Skill Formation and the Trouble with Child Non-Cognitive Skill Measures

Emilia Del Bono, Josh Kinsler and Ronni Pavan

No 13713, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Research on child skill formation and related policies typically rely on parent- reported measures of child non-cognitive skills. In this paper, we show that parental assessments of child non-cognitive skills are directly affected by the skills of the parents. We develop a dynamic model of child and parental skill formation that accounts for this contamination and show how standard estimates of the production of skills are affected. We then use our model to illustrate how contamination in parental measures of child non-cognitive skills affects estimates of child development policies that also directly affect parental skills.

Keywords: children; human capital; dynamic factor analysis; measurement; policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 C18 I38 J13 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 63 pages
Date: 2020-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp13713.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:dp13713

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 ().