Income Comparisons and Non-Cognitive Skills

Literacy Skills, Non-Cognitive Skills and Earnings: An Economist’s Perspective

Can video games affect children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills?∗

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether there is a causal relationship between video game playing and children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills. According to the literature, video games have a potential to improve children’s cognitive abilities. Video games may also positively affect such non-cognitive skills as the ability to sustain attention and pro-social behavior. On the other ...

The Income Gap in Cognitive Skills in Rural Pakistan

Income Rank and Upward Comparisons

Many studies have argued that relative income predicts individual well-being. More recently, it has been suggested that the relative rank of an individual’s income, rather than how that income compares to a mean or reference income, is important. Here the relative rank hypothesis is examined along with the additional hypothesis that individuals compare their incomes predominantly with those of ...

Hard Skills, Soft Skills: The Relative Roles of Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills in Intergenerational Social Mobility

In this article, we adopt a two-step strategy to assess the relative roles of cognitive and noncognitive skills in mediating the relationship between family SES and children’s academic achievement using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. First, we decompose the total effects of family background on children’s achievement into: (1) direct effects of family back...