Shelly Lundberg - University of California-Santa Barbara
Educational Inequality and the Returns to Skills
Date: 09/05/2013 (Thu)
Time: 3:30pm- 5:00pm
Location: Seminar will be held on-site: Gross Hall - 270
Organizer: Prof Elizabeth Ananat, Ph.D.
Meeting Schedule: Login or email the organizer to schedule a meeting.
All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.
9:45am - Liz Ananat picks up at WaDuke
10:00am - Manoj Mohanan
10:30am - Ryan Brown, Andrea Velasquez
11:00am - Michael Burrows, Gabriela Farfan, Veronica Montalva
11:30am - Marjorie McElroy
12:00pm - Lunch--Seth Sanders and Majorie McElroy
1:15pm - Marina Gorsuch, Pohlin Tan, Xiaomin Fu
2:00pm - Giovanna Merli
2:30pm - Amar Hamoudi
3:00pm - Joe Hotz
3:30pm - Seminar Presentation (3:30pm to 5:00pm)
5:00pm - Reception for Shelly Lundberg
6:30pm - Dinner with Liz Ananat, Duncan Thomas, Elizabeth Frankenberg and Peter Arcidiacono
Additional Comments: ABSTRACT: Research and policy discussion about the diverging fortunes of children from advantaged and disadvantaged households have focused on the skill disparities between these children—how they might arise and how they might be remediated. This analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health reveals another important mechanism in the determinants of educational attainment—differential returns to skills for children in different circumstances. Though the returns to cognitive ability are generally consistent across family background groups, personality traits have very different effects on educational attainment for young men and women with access to different levels of parental resources. These results are consistent with a model in which the provision of focused effort in school is complementary with parental inputs while openness, associated with imagination and exploration, may be a substitute for information provision by educated parents. These results suggest that, in designing early investments in the skills of disadvantaged children, we need to be cognizant of interactions between a child’s circumstances and their cognitive and non-cognitive skills, and of the qualities that help to make children resilient in low-resource environments.