Childhood Aspirations and Adult Outcomes

Margaret Leighton () and Irina Merkurieva ()
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Margaret Leighton: University of St Andrews
Irina Merkurieva: University of St Andrews

No 2505, Economics Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, The University of St Andrews Business School

Abstract: This paper extracts aspirations from texts written in childhood by members of a British longitudinal cohort and explores how these relate to later life outcomes. Applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to short essays collected at age 11, we identify four aspiration themes: family, hobbies, financial success, and career. The weight of these four themes varies substantially across respondents, with girls on average placing more weight on family, and boys on financial success. Aspirations extracted using our method are strongly predictive of later life outcomes, even when controlling for detailed measures of early life environment, ability, and family background. These associations are often highly heterogeneous by gender; for example, family-related aspirations are associated with higher educational attainment for men, but lower educational attainment for women.

Keywords: Aspirations; Education; Natural Language Processing; NCDS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J26 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-12-17
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:san:econdp:2505

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