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Source: PIER Working Papers
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Todd, Petra E.
The Production of Cognitive Achievement in Children: Home, School and Racial Test Score Gaps
Working Paper, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, October 2005.
Also: http://ideas.repec.org/p/pen/papers/04-019.html
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79
Publisher: Penn Institute for Economic Research (PIER)
Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB); Hispanics; Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); Maternal Employment; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Racial Differences; School Characteristics/Rating/Safety; Teachers/Faculty

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

This paper studies the determinants of children's scores on tests of cognitive achievement in math and reading. Using rich longitudinal data on test scores, home environments, and schools, we implement alternative specifications for the production function for achievement and test their assumptions. We do not find support for commonly used restrictive models that assume test scores depend only on contemporaneous inputs or that assume conditioning on a lagged score captures all the effects of past inputs. Instead, the results show that both contemporaneous and lagged inputs matter in the production of current achievement and that it is important to allow for unobserved child-specific endowment effects and endogeneity of inputs. Using a specification that incorporates these features, we study the sources of test score gaps between black, white and Hispanic children. The estimated model captures key patterns in the data, such as the widening of minority-white test score gaps with age and differences in the gap pattern between Hispanics and blacks and between boys and girls. We find that equalizing home inputs at the average levels of white children would close the black-white test score gap by about 25% and close the Hispanic-white gap by about 30%.
Bibliography Citation
Todd, Petra E. "The Production of Cognitive Achievement in Children: Home, School and Racial Test Score Gaps." Working Paper, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, October 2005.