Identity and Schooling: Some Lessons for the Economics of Education

By George A. Akerlof, Rachel Kranton. 2002

935 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This review culls noneconomic literature on education--by sociologists, anthropologists, and practitioners to present a new economic theory of students and schools. This theory elaborates two themes that have eluded economic analysis. First is the student as decision-maker whose primary motivation is her identity. Second is a conception of the school as a social institution. This framework suggests a new perspective on questions such as resource allocation and school reform. It explains why some educational policies succeed and others fail. We show how sociological variables may affect outcomes, and suggest ways economists can incorporate them into theoretical and empirical research.

Subfields: Demography, Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4ffb354bd37a00b43c66ab7620b6c736fdb6a81d

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Citations in the corpus

Oppositional Identities and Employment for Ethnic Minorities: Evidence from England (2010, positive): “Akerlof and Kranton (2002) propose a theory in which a student’s primary motivation is his or her identity (i.e. students, have to choose their social categories and effort in school), students have an interest to minimise the distance between themselves, their “proper” characteristics and actions…”
Information and College Access: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment. Working Paper 18551. (2012, positive): “Each of these identities can be more or less salient at any moment of time and the relative salience of different identities can significantly affect behavior (Akerlof and Kranton, 2002, McLeish and Oxoby, 2008).”
Heterogeneous peer effects in education (2014, neutral): “At equilibrium, each agent maximizes her utility (1) and we obtain the following best-reply function for each  = 1  :”
The Conflicting Choices of Alternating Selves (2010, background): “When a situation renders an applicable identity salient, people are thought to ‘‘self-stereotype,” adopting the traits and values of the momentarily salient identity (Biernat, Vescio, & Green, 1996; Turner, 1985, 1987; see also Akerlof & Kranton, 2000, 2002, 2005).”
Social Interactions and the Salience of Social Identity (2011, positive): “Past research has shown that each of these identities can be more or less salient at any moment of time and the relative salience of different identities can significantly affect behavior (Akerlof and Kranton, 2000, 2004).”
Gender Identity and Relative Income within Households (2013, background): “Nevertheless, the magnitude of the estimate remains sizable and is economically significant (the magnitude is similar to that of the baseline specification using predicted earnings in Column (4)).”
Identity, morals, and taboos: beliefs as assets. (2011, background): “In an influential set of papers, Akerlof and Kranton (2000, 2002, 2005), emphasize how, in a wide range of contexts, agents’ preferences are structured by their choices of a social category (see also Shayo 2009 on redistributive politics and Basu 2006).”
Making up people—The effect of identity on performance in a modernizing society (2014, background): “Akerlof and Kranton (2002) present evidence that whether students invest in schooling depends in part on their cultural identity, wherein payoffs differ among “jocks,” “nerds,” and “burnouts.””
Akerlof and Kranton on identity in economics: inverting the analysis (2007, background): “More recent attention to identity has come from Akerlof and Kranton (2000, 2002, 2005), Barrett (2005), Darity et al. (forthcoming), Davis (2003, 2006), Livet (2004), Loury (2002), Kirman and Teschl (2004), Mason (2004) and Sen (1999, 2004).”
Racial Identity and Education (2006, neutral): “y∗ iB = β 1/(2−β1) 1 k 1/(2−β1) iB £e xiBkB + (1− e xiB) kW ¤1/(2−β1) (3)”
Behavioral Economics of Education (2015, background): “Akerlof and Kranton (2002) point out that a pupil’s motivation may depend on the social setting that the school creates and the extent to which the student accepts or rejects the ideals of the school.”
Behavioral Economics of Education: Progress and Possibilities (2015, positive): “Akerlof and Kranton (2002) argue that students care about the extent to which their behavior deviates from that of their social group (e.g. based on gender, race or being athletic or studious).”