EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

How Learning a Musical Instrument Affects the Development of Skills

Adrian Hille (adrian.hille@bk.bund.de) and Jürgen Schupp

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2015, vol. 44, 56-82

Abstract: Despite numerous studies on skill development, we know little about the effects of extracurricular music activities on cognitive and non-cognitive skills. This study examines how music training during childhood and youth affects the development of cognitive skills, school grades, personality, time use and ambition using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Our findings suggest that adolescents with music training have better school grades, are more conscientious, open and ambitious. These effects are stronger among adolescents from lower socio-economic status. In order to address the non-random selection into playing music, we take into account detailed information on the child and its parents, which may determine both the decision to pursue music lessons and educational outcomes. While lacking truly exogenous variations in music activities, our results are robust to a large range of sensitivity tests. We thereby approach causality better than previous observational studies.

Keywords: Music; Cognitive and non-cognitive skills; Educational achievement; SOEP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J24 Z11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (31)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/105863/1/H ... Learning-Musical.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: How learning a musical instrument affects the development of skills (2015) Downloads
Working Paper: How Learning a Musical Instrument Affects the Development of Skills (2013) Downloads
Working Paper: How Learning a Musical Instrument Affects the Development of Skills (2013) Downloads
Working Paper: How learning a musical instrument affects the development of 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:zbw:espost:105863

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (econstor@zbw-workspace.eu).

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:zbw:espost:105863