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Title: Lessons from the Technology of Skill Formation
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Heckman, James J. |
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Lessons from the Technology of Skill Formation NBER Working Paper No. 11142, National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2005 Also: http://www.mineduc.cl/biblio/documento/w11142.pdf Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Bias Decomposition; Children, Academic Development; Children, Behavioral Development; Family Income; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Skill Formation This paper discusses recent advances in our understanding of differences in human abilities and skills, their sources, and their evolution over the lifecycle....The study of human skill formation is no longer handicapped by the taboo that once made it impermissible to talk about differences among people. It is now well documented that people are very diverse on a large array of abilities, that these abilities account for a substantial amount of the variation found among people in terms of their socioeconomic success, and that gaps among children from various socioeconomic groups open up at early ages, and, if anything, widen as children become adults. The family plays a powerful role in shaping these abilities. From a variety of intervention studies, we know that these gaps can be partially remedied if the remediation is attempted at early enough ages. The remediation efforts that appear to be most effective are those that supplement family resources for young children from disadvantaged environments. Since the family is the fundamental source of human inequality, programs that target young children from disadvantaged families have the greatest economic and social returns. I make this case through a series of arguments, bolstered by graphs and tables extracted from Heckman and Masterov (2004), Cunha and Heckman (2003) and Carneiro and Heckman (2003). |
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Bibliography Citation
Heckman, James J. "Lessons from the Technology of Skill Formation." NBER Working Paper No. 11142, National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2005. |