Teacher quality, test scores and non-cognitive skills: Evidence from primary school teachers in the UK

Schooling can produce both cognitive and non-cognitive skills, both of which are important determinants of adult outcomes. Using very rich data from a UK birth cohort study, I estimate teacher value added (VA) models for both pupils' test scores and non-cognitive skills. I show that teachers are equally important in the determination of pupils' test scores and non-cognitive skills. This finding extends the economics literature on teacher effects, which has primarily focused on pupils' test scores and may fail to capture teachers' overall effects. In addition, the large estimates reveal an interesting trade-off: teacher VA on pupils' test scores are weak predictors of teacher VA on non-cognitive skills, which suggests that teachers recourse to different techniques to improve pupils' cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Finally, I find that teachers' effects on pupils' non-cognitive skills have long-run impacts on adult outcomes such as higher education attendance, employment and earnings,conditional on their effects on test scores. This result indicates that long-run outcomes are improved by a combination of teachers increasing pupils' test scores and non-cognitive skills and has large policy implications

Distaste for centralization: evidence from a quasi-natural experiment in Switzerland

Do people care about the degree of centralization? This paper examines the effects of local centralization reforms on individuals' well-being using a quasi-natural experiment in Switzerland. The results reveal that centralization has a causal negative impact on individuals' life satisfaction. Consistent with the concept of procedural utility, centralization reduces individuals' feeling of having political influence and interest in politics. In contrast, there are no impacts on individuals' satisfaction with local governments' performance. These findings shed new light on what people value in decentralized institutions

Do more of those in misery suffer from poverty, unemployment or mental illness?

Studies of deprivation usually ignore mental illness. This paper uses household panel data from the USA, Australia, Britain and Germany to broaden the analysis. We ask first how many of those in the lowest levels of life-satisfaction suffer from unemployment, poverty, physical ill health, and mental illness. The largest proportion suffer from mental illness. Multiple regression shows that mental illness is not highly correlated with poverty or unemployment, and that it contributes more to explaining the presence of misery than is explained by either poverty or unemployment. This holds both with and without fixed effects

Parental sleep and employment: evidence from a British cohort study

We show that sleep deprivation exerts a strong negative effect on labour market performance. We exploit variations in child sleep quality to instrument for parental sleep quality. A one-hour reduction in sleep duration significantly decreases labour force participation, the number of hour’s worked and household income. In addition, we find that low-skilled mothers are more likely to opt out of the labour market and work less hours than high-skilled mothers when exposed to sleep deprivation. We argue that sleep is a major determinant of employment outcomes that needs more attention in designing economic models of time allocation and employment policies

Sleep deprivation, even when moderate, hurts employment

The effect is felt more strongly by low-skilled mothers of children with disruptive sleep patterns, write Joan Costa-i-Font and Sarah Flèch

The long-lasting effects of family and childhood on adult wellbeing: Evidence from British cohort data

To what extent do childhood experiences continue to affect adult wellbeing over the life course? Previous work on this link has been carried out either at one particular adult age or for some average over adulthood. We here use two British birth-cohort datasets (the 1958 NCDS and the 1970 BCS) to map out the time profile of the effect of childhood experiences on adult outcomes, including life satisfaction. We find that the effects of many aspects of childhood do not fade away over time but are rather remarkably stable. In both birth-cohorts, child non-cognitive skills are the strongest predictors of adult life satisfaction at all ages. Of these, emotional health is the strongest. Childhood cognitive performance is more important than good conduct in explaining adult life satisfaction in the earlier NCDS cohort, whereas this ranking is inverted in the more recent BCS.Support from the US National Institute on Aging (Grant R01AG040640), the John Templeton Foundation and the What Works Centre for Wellbeing is gratefully acknowledged. We also thank CEPREMAP for financial support. For the BCS and NCDS data access, we are grateful to The Centre for Longitudinal Studies, UCL Institute of Education for the use of these data and to the UK Data Archive and UK Data Service for making them availabl

The Great Happiness Moderation

This paper shows that within-country happiness inequality has fallen in the majority of countries that have experienced positive income growth over the last forty years, in particular in developed countries. This new stylized fact comes as an addition to the Easterlin paradox, which states that the time trend in average happiness is flat during episodes of long-run income growth. This mean-preserving declining spread in happiness comes about via falls in both the share of individuals who declare low and high levels of happiness. Rising income inequality moderates the fall in happiness inequality, and may even reverse it after some point, for example in the US starting in the 1990s. Hence, if raising the income of all does not raise the happiness of all, it will at least harmonize the happiness of all, providing that income inequality does not grow too much. Behind the veil of ignorance, lower happiness inequality would certainly be considered as attractive by risk-averse individuals

Is daylight saving time good for us?

Daylight saving time is observed in over seventy countries with the goal of reducing energy use. However, there’s no consensus on the desirability of changing the clock twice a year. In March 2019, the European Parliament voted to repeal daylight saving time. Studies show that, by reducing the number of hours we sleep, time shifts decrease our life satisfaction. Joan Costa-Font, Sarah Flèche, and Ricardo Pagan write that the night-time shift at the end of March reduces individual happiness by the equivalent of 393 euros a year

The long-lasting effects of family and childhood on adult wellbeing: evidence from British Cohort data

To what extent do childhood experiences continue to affect adult wellbeing over the life course? Previous work on this link has been carried out either at one particular adult age or for some average of adulthood. We here use two British birth-cohort datasets (the 1958 NCDS and the 1970 BCS) to map out the time profile of the effect of childhood on adult outcomes, including life satisfaction. We find that the effect of many aspects of childhood do not fade away over time, but are rather remarkably stable. In both birth cohorts child non-cognitive skills are the strongest predictors of adult life satisfaction at all ages. Of these, emotional health is the strongest. Childhood cognitive performance is more important than good conduct in explaining adult life satisfaction in the earlier cohort, whereas this ranking is inverted in the more recent BC

The big factors affecting life satisfaction are all non-economic

What distinguishes ‘Les Misérables’ from the rest is neither poverty nor unemployment, but mental illness, write Andrew Clark, Sarah Fleche, Richard Layard, Nattavudh (Nick) Powdthavee and George War