The Effect of Schooling and Ability on Achievement Test Scores

By Karsten Hansen, James J. Heckman, Kathleen J. Mullen. Social Science Research Network, 2003

420 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper develops two methods for estimating the effect of schooling on achievement test scores that control for the endogeneity of schooling by postulating that both schooling and test scores are generated by a common unobserved latent ability. These methods are applied to data on schooling and test scores. Estimates from the two methods are in close agreement. We find that the effects of schooling on test scores are roughly linear across schooling levels. The effects of schooling on measured test scores are slightly larger for lower latent ability levels. We find that schooling increases the AFQT score on average between 2 and 4 percentage points, roughly twice as large as the effect claimed by Herrnstein and Murray (1994) but in agreement with estimates produced by Neal and Johnson (1996) and Winship and Korenman (1997). We extend the previous literature by estimating the impact of schooling on measured test scores at various quantiles of the latent ability distribution.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a75343240fbb787a356089de6ced1bf34b459eb3

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Citations in the corpus

Are Risk Aversion and Impatience Related to Cognitive Ability? (2009, neutral): “Previous evidence suggests that educational attainment affects performance on the AFQT (Hansen et al., 2004; Cascio and Lewis, 2006).”
Is Early Learning Really More Productive? The Effect of School Starting Age on School and Labor Market Performance (2005, positive): “The timing of the data collection is, thus, crucial for separately identifying the effect of the school starting age; this point is also made by Hansen et al. (2004).”
The Technology of Skill Formation (2007, neutral): “[21] Hansen, Karsten, James J.”
Hard evidence on soft skills (2012, positive): “Hartlage and Steele (1977) find that the arithmetic portions of standardized achievement tests are the most highly correlated with IQ. Grades and scores on IQ tests and standardized achievement tests are far from perfectly correlated, suggesting that they measure different aspects of “cognitive func”
Why Has Black-White Skill Convergence Stopped? NBER Working Paper No. 11090. (2005, positive): “They control for endogeneity in attainment at the time of the test using two methods developed in Hansen et al (2004) and conclude that, on average, AQFT scores do increase with schooling faster among white students than black students.”
If you are so smart, why aren't you an Entrepreneur? (2008, neutral): “As Panel A indicates, an individual’s spread in measured ability levels is irrelevant for earnings if we do not distinguish between employee and entrepreneur status, irrespective of the inclusion of controls for education or ability levels into the equation.”
Personality Psychology and Economics (2011, positive): “Baseline test scores are estimated using the procedure of Hansen et al. 2004 as implemented in Carneiro, Heckman and Vytlacil [2005]. The regressions use the cross-sectional subsample and minority oversamples of the NLSY79 data.”