The role of parental investments for cognitive and noncognitive skill formation: Evidence for the first 11 years of life

Katja Coneus, Manfred Laucht and Karsten Reuß ()

No 10-028, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of parental investments on the development of cognitive, mental and emotional skills during childhood using data from a longitudinal study, the Mannheim Study of Children at Risk, starting at birth. Our work offers three important innovations. First, we use reliable measures of the child's cognitive, mental and emotional skills as well as accurate measures of parental investment. Second, we estimate latent factor models to account for unobserved characteristics of children. Third, we examine the skill development for girls and boys separately, as well as for children who were born with either organic or psychosocial risk. We find a decreasing impact of parental investments on cognitive and mental skills, while emotional skills seem to be unaffected by parental investment throughout childhood. Thus, initial inequality persists during childhood. Since families are the main sources of education during the first years of life, our results have important implications for the quality of the parent-child relationship.

Keywords: cognitive skills; noncognitive skills; critical and sensitive periods; self-productivity; inequality; organic risk; psychosocial risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I21 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-hap, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-neu
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https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/32784/1/625719212.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The role of parental investments for cognitive and noncognitive skill formation—Evidence for the first 11 years of life (2012)
Chapter: The Role of parental investments for cognitive and noncognitive skill formation – Evidence for the first 11 years of life (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:10028

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