Monetary and time investments in children's education: how do they differ in workless households?

Around 9% of children in the European Union live in households in which no parent is working. Children living in these workless households are of increasing interest to researchers, policy makers, and the wider public. Workless households not only have lower income on average but are also widely considered to be at risk of social exclusion. In this paper, we study the relationship between parents’ employment status and their time and monetary investments in their child’s education using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We use matching methods and regression analysis to compare educational investments made in children from a workless background to children with at least one working parent, but otherwise very similar background characteristics. Our analyses indicate that parents’ worklessness is associated with lower monetary investments in their children’s education. However, we do not find a dierence in monetary investments in the form of commercial tutoring. In terms of time investments, we find that workless parents – especially workless single parents – spend more time helping their child doing homework. These findings could help guide future social policy aimed at equalising opportunities for children living in workless households. Conditional on a deeper understanding of the implications of worklessness on country level, measures such as educational vouchers or stipend programmes specifically aimed at socially disadvantaged children could be introduced

Intergenerational educational mobility – The role of non-cognitive skills

While it has been shown that university attendance is strongly predicted by parental education, we know very little about why some potential first-generation students make it to university and others do not. This paper looks at the role of non-cognitive skills in the university participation of this disadvantaged group in England. We find that having higher levels of locus of control, academic self-concept, work ethic, and self-esteem in adolescence is positively related to intergenerational educational mobility to university. Our results indicate these skills help potential first-generation students to compensate for their relative disadvantage, and they are especially crucial for boys

The big-fish-little-pond effect and overclaiming

Using the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study, we investigate whether students’ relative ability in mathematics (in comparison to their school peers) is linked to their tendency to overclaim. Although the estimated effect size is modest (around 0.1 standard deviations) we find empirical support that being a big fish in a small pond is linked to overclaiming, with this robust to different analytic approaches and model specifications. Thus, being one of the highest academic achievers within a school may push young people's beliefs in their own abilities too far, straying into overconfidence and making claims about their knowledge and skills that they cannot justify

Overclaiming. An international investigation using PISA data

This paper investigates the phenomena of overclaiming – the propensity for individuals to claim more knowledge about an issue or topic than they really (or could possibly) do. Using Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data from nine Anglophone countries and over 40,000 young people, we examine teenagers’ propensity to claim knowledge of three mathematics constructs that do not really exist. We find substantial differences in young people’s tendency to overclaim across countries, genders, and socio-economic groups. Those who are most likely to overclaim are also found to exhibit high levels of overconfidence and believe they work hard, persevere at tasks, and are popular amongst their peers. Together this provides important new insight into overclaiming, how this differs across groups, and how it relates to other psychological constructs

The Gender Gap in Top Jobs – The Role of Overconfidence

There is a large gender gap in the probability of being in a “top job” in mid-career. Top jobs bring higher earnings, and also have more job security and better career trajectories. Recent literature has raised the possibility that some of this gap may be attributable to women not “leaning in” while men are more overconfident in their abilities. We use longitudinal data from childhood into mid-career and construct a measure of overconfidence using multiple measures of objective cognitive ability and subjective estimated ability. Our measure confirms previous findings that men are more overconfident than women. We then use linear regression and decomposition techniques to account for the gender gap in top jobs including our measure of overconfidence. Our results show that men being more overconfident explains 5–11 percent of the gender gap in top job employment. This indicates that while overconfidence matters for gender inequality in the labor market and has implications for how firms recruit and promote workers, other individual, structural, and societal factors play a larger role