Essays on Noncognitive Skills
type: CreativeWork
description: Along with cognitive skills, noncognitive skills have been increasingly adopted to analyze individual behavior. My dissertation comprises of two chapters which combine economics with psychology theories and applied econometric methods to examine the role of noncognitive skills at different developmental stages; first, I study the formation of noncognitive skills in early childhood and, second, I examine the effect of noncognitive skills on the gender wage gap during mid- and late- adulthood. In the first chapter I propose a novel mechanism through which mothers produce high quality (skilled) children by focusing on maternal life satisfaction, which I interpret as maternal happiness. The goal of this first chapter is to identify a causal maternal life satisfaction effect on child outcomes, and to see if inferences about the effects of marriage remain after we have conditioned on maternal life satisfaction. Because happiness and family structure are entwined—with marriage potentially increasing happiness and happiness increasing the probability of marriage—I must separate the effects of happiness from the effects of marital status. Using data for U.K. children ages 3-7 from the Millennium Cohort Study, I simultaneously model maternal happiness, marital status, and a value-added, child skill production function; I use a cognitive test score and several behavioral scores as alternative child skill measures. This three-equation model accounts for the endogeneity of happiness and marital status, which enables me to identify separate causal effects of both on child cognitive and noncognitive skills. Embedded in chapter one is a discussion about an improved method for constructing cognitive and noncognitive skill measures. I calculate theta-scores from item response theory (IRT) models to account for the latent nature of child skills. I find that both marriage and happiness are predicted to improve test scores, with marriage primarily improving cognitive test scores and sel…
abstract: Along with cognitive skills, noncognitive skills have been increasingly adopted to analyze individual behavior. My dissertation comprises of two chapters which combine economics with psychology theories and applied econometric methods to examine the role of noncognitive skills at different developmental stages; first, I study the formation of noncognitive skills in early childhood and, second, I examine the effect of noncognitive skills on the gender wage gap during mid- and late- adulthood. In the first chapter I propose a novel mechanism through which mothers produce high quality (skilled) children by focusing on maternal life satisfaction, which I interpret as maternal happiness. The goal of this first chapter is to identify a causal maternal life satisfaction effect on child outcomes, and to see if inferences about the effects of marriage remain after we have conditioned on maternal life satisfaction. Because happiness and family structure are entwined—with marriage potentially increasing happiness and happiness increasing the probability of marriage—I must separate the effects of happiness from the effects of marital status. Using data for U.K. children ages 3-7 from the Millennium Cohort Study, I simultaneously model maternal happiness, marital status, and a value-added, child skill production function; I use a cognitive test score and several behavioral scores as alternative child skill measures. This three-equation model accounts for the endogeneity of happiness and marital status, which enables me to identify separate causal effects of both on child cognitive and noncognitive skills. Embedded in chapter one is a discussion about an improved method for constructing cognitive and noncognitive skill measures. I calculate theta-scores from item response theory (IRT) models to account for the latent nature of child skills. I find that both marriage and happiness are predicted to improve test scores, with marriage primarily improving cognitive test scores and sel…
author: Nikolaou, Dimitrios
language: English
keywords: Economics, Noncognitive skills, life satisfaction, child development, item response theory, gender wage gap, cognitive skills, occupational choice
date published: 2013-08-09
date modified: 2026-07-24T03:37:31Z
provider: OhioLINK
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The Ohio State University