The Effect of Family Background on Student Effort

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Kuehn, Zoe Landeras, Pedro Ort, Eduard Kuehn, Zoë
Copyright Year	2013
Abstract	While students from more advantageous family backgrounds tend to perform better, it is not clear that they exert more e ort compared to those from less advantageous family backgrounds. We build a model of students, schools, and employers to study the interaction of family background and e ort exerted by the student in the education process. Academic quali cations, which entail an income premium in the labor market, are noisily determined by e ort and the student's ability to bene t from education, which in turn depends on her family background and innate talent. In a situation where schools set the optimal passing standard, two factors turn out to be key in determining the relationship between e ort and family background: (i) the student's risk aversion and (ii) the degree with which family background alters the student's marginal productivity of e ort. We show that when the degree of risk aversion is relatively low (high) compared to the sensitivity of the marginal productivity of the student's e ort with respect to her family background, the relation between e ort and family background is positive (negative) and students from more advantageous family backgrounds exert more (less) e ort. Considering Spanish data and controlling for school xed e ects, we nd that an improvement in parental education from not having completed compulsory education to holding a university degree is associated to around 15% more e ort by the student (approximately 1 hour and 20 minutes of additional weekly homework). We also nd empirical evidence consistent with our assumption that students' marginal productivity of e ort varies with family background. JEL classi cation: I21, I28, D81.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/40531/1/MPRA_paper_40531.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Subject Keyword	Cations Cations, Monovalent Cautionary Warning Choice Behavior Diabetes Insipidus Disease regression Ectomesenchymal Chondromyxoid Tumor Elasticity (data store) Endogeneity (econometrics) Knowledge acquisition Large MALL gene Marginal model Naruto Shippuden: Clash of Ninja Revolution 3 Open road tolling Quantity Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering Risk aversion School Schools, Secondary Small Theory physical hard work
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article