Abstract
We use information on second-generation migrants to study the existence of a cultural component on the formation process of noncognitive skills and its effect on education and employment outcomes. Our measures of noncognitive skills include: personality traits that children are encouraged to learn at home and inherited civic capital. Individuals whose cultural heritage places a relatively higher value to independence and, in comparison, a relative lower value on child qualities positively associated with the conscientiousness personality factor, i.e. hard work and thrift, report lower education, worse occupational status and lower wages on average. Individuals with a higher inherited civic capital declare a higher educational level, but we find no effect of inherited civic capital on adult labor market outcomes.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
See, e.g. Chiswick and DebBurman (2004) for an overview of this literature.
The idea that culture affects individual behavior goes back to at least Max Weber who, in his classical work “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” (Weber 1905), argued that a particular culture, the “Protestant Ethic”, supported by Reformation teachings that the pursuit of wealth was a duty, played a major role in the development of capitalism.
See Becker et al. (2016) for a review of this strand of literature.
5Mendez (2015) showed, using the same child quality measures obtained from the WVS, that country differences in the qualities that children are encouraged to learn at home account for differences in 15 years old European and Australian students’ performance in the PISA study. In particular, he found that a one-standard-deviation increase in culture accounted for between 10 and 30% of the standard deviation of student performance across ancestries, depending on the particular subject and host country considered. Although significant, these results would not be so relevant if they do not translate into better outcomes later in life.
As shown in Hansen (2007), the clustered covariance matrix is valid for inference when the number of clusters is large and the size of the clusters is fixed. However, as it does not seem to be a consensus on how many clusters is large enough and the set of immigrants’ countries of ancestry in the sample might not be large enough, we have also computed standard errors of our estimated effects using wild bootstrap keeping the cluster structure of the data. Our conclusions were robust to this alternative approach for computing standard errors. These results are available from the authors upon request.
It is not surprising that reported child qualities are not orthogonal across respondents as we believe they represent different factors in the Big 5 personality measures, as described in the results section, and it is well known in the psychology literature that these are not orthogonal (see, e.g. DeYoung 2006; Digman 1997; Hirsh et al. 2009).
According to Guiso and Sapienza (2010), there are seven questions in the WVS that capture how much people value public goods and, thus, can be used to proxy for the relevance of civic capital in a country. These questions include the four we considered in the analysis, as well as the respondent’s agreement with the following behaviors: “Lying on your own interest”, “Throwing away litter in a public space” and “Speeding over the limit in built up areas”. However, all these questions were not asked in all the waves of WVS and so, we do not use the latter three variables since they are not available for most countries in our sample. Equivalently, the single index of civic capital obtained in Guiso and Sapienza (2010) only considered three behaviors (i.e. claim government benefits, cheat on taxes and accept a bribe) out of the four questions used in our application.
We also explored alternative definitions based on having an immigrant mother instead and results were similar to the ones presented in this paper. These estimates are presented in the robustness estimates section. The alternative of requiring two immigrant parents for a native-born individual to be classified as second-generation migrant leads to a much smaller sample size.
Polychoric correlation is a technique frequently used when performing principal component analysis on self-reported items that only take a small number of response options. This technique has the advantage of helping reduce the influence of the structure of the data on the results of the analysis. For instance, it is developed to avoid that the number of possible responses in the scale lead to items grouping together in factors.
Similar results were obtained on correlations at the individual level. Results available from the authors upon request.
These estimates are available upon request to the authors.
Note that our factor analyses are performed at the respondent level and so, even though the extracted factors are independent at this level of analysis, the aggregated factors at the country of ancestry level are weakly correlated with each other.
This information is not included in more recent census data sets.
Alternatively, we also considered more general definitions that do not condition by age. The estimates of interest remain largely unchanged when using these alternative variables.
Obviously, we cannot control for all the relevant features of culture in our estimates and, thus, we cannot ensure that our estimates have a causal interpretation. However, it should be pointed out that we reach to similar results in terms of the adjusted R 2 values when using the more traditional approach of including country of ancestry dummies instead of particular cultural proxies. This suggests that our cultural proxies have meaningful explanatory power. This result is further described in the robustness checks section.
These results are confirmed when using the whole estimation sample but adding interaction terms between gender and the cultural variables.
These estimates are available upon request to the authors.
We also obtained similar results when we dropped the group of respondents from Canadian ancestry, who we believe could most resemble American natives, and also when we alternatively dropped one ancestry at a time. These results are available upon request to the authors.
We thank an anonymous referee for having suggested us this test.
Similar results are obtained when using the other outcome variables considered.
References
Alesina A, Giuliano P (2010) The power of the family. J Econ Growth 15(2):93–125
Alesina A, Giuliano P, Nunn N (2011) Fertility and the plough. Amer Econ Rev Papers Proc 101(3):499–503
Algan Y, Cahuc P (2005) The roots of low European employment: family culture? In: NBER International seminar on macroeconomics 2005, NBER Chapters: 65-109
Algan Y, Cahuc P (2006) Civic attitudes and the design of labor market institutions: Which countries can implement the Danish flexicurity model? CEPR Discussion Papers no. 5489
Almlund M, Duckworth AL, Heckman JJ, Kautz TD (2011) Personality psychology and economics. In: Hanushek EA, Machin S, Wößmann L (eds) Handbook of the economics of education. Elsevier, Amsterdam
Arias BM (1986) The context of education for Hispanic students: an overview. Amer J Educ 95:26–57
Becker SO, Pfaff S, Rubin J (2016) Causes and consequences of the protestant reformation. The Warwick economics research paper series (TWERPS) 1105. University of Warwick. Department of Economics
Becker SO, Woessmann L (2009) Was Weber wrong? A human capital theory of protestant economic history. Quart J Econ 124(2):531–596
Borghans L, Meijers H, Weel BT (2008) The role of noncognitive skills in explaining cognitive test scores. Econ Inq 46(1):2–12
Borjas GJ (1992) Ethnic capital and intergenerational mobility. Quart J Econ 107(1):123–150
Borjas GJ (1995) Ethnicity, neighborhoods, and human-capital externalities. Amer Econ Rev 85(3):365–90
Brunello G, Schlotter M (2011) Non cognitive skills and personality traits: labor market relevance and their development in education & training systems. IZA Discussion Paper no 5743
Cawley J, Heckman JJ, Vytlacil EJ (2001) Three observations on wages and measured cognitive ability. Labour Econ 8(4):419–442
Chiswick BR (1988) Differences in education and earnings across racial and ethnic groups: tastes, discrimination, and investments in child quality. Quart J Econ 103(3):571–597
Chiswick BR, DebBurman NN (2004) Educational attainment: analysis by immigrant generation. Econ Educ Rev 23(4):361–379
Costa PT, McCrae RR (1992) Revised NEO personality inventory (NEOPI-R) and the NEO five-factor inventory (NEO-FFI) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources, Odessa
Cunha F, Heckman JJ (2008) Formulating, identifying and estimating the technology of cognitive and noncognitive skill formation. J Human Resour 43(4):738–782
DeYoung CG (2006) Higher-order factors of the big five in a multi-informant sample. J Person Soc Psychol 91:1138–1151
Digman JM (1997) Higher-order factors of the big five. J Person Soc Psychol 73:1246–1256
Dohmen T, Falk A, Huffman D, Sunde U (2012) The intergenerational transmission of risk and trust attitudes. Rev Econ Stud 79(2):645–677
Fernandez R (2008) Culture and economics. In: Durlauf SN, Blume LE (eds) New Palgrave dictionary of economics. 2nd edn. Palrave and Macmillian, New York
Fernandez R (2011) Does culture matter? In: Jess B, Jackson M O, Bisin A (eds) Handbook of social sciences, vol 1A, North Holland
Fernandez R, Fogli A (2009) Culture: an empirical investigation of beliefs, work, and fertility. Amer Econ J Macroecon 1(1):146–177
Giuliano P (2007) Living arrangements in Western Europe: does cultural origin matter? J Eur Econ Assoc 5(5):927–952
Gough HG, Heilbrun AB (1983) The adjective check list manual. Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto
Guiso L, Sapienza P, Zingales L (2006) Does culture affect economic outcomes? J Econ Perspect 20(2):23–48
Guiso L, Sapienza P, Zingales L (2009) Cultural biases in economic exchange? Quart J Econ 124(3):1095–1131
Guiso L, Sapienza P (2010) Civic capital as the missing link. In: Zingales L, Benhabib J, Bisin A, Jackson MO (eds) Social economics handbook, vol 1. Elsevier
Hansen CB (2007) Asymptotic properties of a robust variance matrix estimator for panel data when T is large. J Economet 141:597–620
Heckman JJ (1978) Dummy endogenous variables in a simultaneous equation system. Econometrica 46(4):931–959
Heckman JJ (2011) Integrating personality psychology into economics. IZA Discussion Paper no. 5950, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Heckman JJ, Kautz T (2013) Fostering and measuring skills: interventions that improve character and cognition. NBER WorkingPaper no. 19656. National Bureau of Economic Research
Heckman JJ, Rodrigo P, Savelyev P (2013) Understanding the mechanisms through which an influential early childhood program boosted adult outcomes. Amer Econ Rev 103(6):2052–86
Hirschman C, Wong MG (1986) The extraordinary educational attainment of Asian Americans: a search for historical evidence and explanations. Soc Forces 65(1):1–27
Hirsh JB, DeYoung CG, Peterson JB (2009) Metatraits of the big five differentially predict engagement and restraint of behavior. J Person 77:1085–1102
Lee ES, Rong X-I (1988) The educational and economic achievement of Asian Americans. Eleme School J 88(5):545–560
Lindqvist E, Vestman R (2011) The labor market returns to cognitive and noncognitive ability: evidence from the Swedish enlistment. Amer Econ J Appl Econ 3(1):101–128
Mendez I (2015) The effect of the intergenerational transmission of noncognitive skills on student performance. Econ Educ Rev 46(June):78–97
Nunziata L, Rocco L (2016) A tale of minorities: evidence on religious ethics and entrepreneurship. J Econ Growth 21(2):189–224
Roland G (2004) Understanding institutional change: fast-moving and slow-moving institutions. Stud Compar Int Develop 38(4):109–131
Tabellini G (2010) Culture and institutions: economic development in the regions of Europe. CESifo Working Paper Series no 1492. CESifo Group, Munich
US Department of Education (2013) Promoting grit, tenacy, and perseverance: critical factors for sucess in the 21st Century
Velez W (1989) High school attrition among Hispanic and non-Hispanic white youths. Sociol Educ 62(2):119–133
Weber M (1905) The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Unwin Hyman, London
Wu CFJ (1986) Jacknife, bootstrap, and other resampling methods in regression analysis. Ann Stat 14:1261–1295
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Fundación Ramón Areces. We thank conference and seminar participants at the 2014 APPAM international conference, the APPAM 37th Annual Fall Research Conference, the RAND Labor and Population Brown Bag seminar series and the Department of Economics at the University of Arkansas seminar series, for their feedback. We also would like to thank the three anonymous referees for all their comments. Finally, we thank Collin Hitt for providing his thoughts on early versions of this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interests
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Funding
This study was funded by a research grant from the Fundación Ramón Areces (Social Science Research Projects, 2011).
Additional information
Responsible editor: Klaus F. Zimmermann
Appendix
Appendix
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Mendez, I., Zamarro, G. The intergenerational transmission of noncognitive skills and their effect on education and employment outcomes. J Popul Econ 31, 521–560 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-017-0661-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-017-0661-0