Attanasio Orazio, Blundell Richard, Conti Gabriella, Mason Giacomo
Department of Economics, University College London, Gordon Street, London, WC1H0AX, UK.
Institute for Fiscal Studies, UK.
J Public Econ. 2020 Nov;191:104171. doi: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2020.104171.
We examine changes in inequality in socio-emotional skills very early in life in two British cohorts born 30 years apart. We construct comparable scales using two validated instruments for the measurement of child behaviour and identify two dimensions of socio-emotional skills: 'internalising' and 'externalising'. Using recent methodological advances in factor analysis, we establish comparability in the inequality of these early skills across cohorts, but not in their average level. We document for the first time that inequality in socio-emotional skills has increased across cohorts, especially for boys and at the bottom of the distribution. We also formally decompose the sources of the increase in inequality and find that compositional changes explain half of the rise in inequality in externalising skills. On the other hand, the increase in inequality in internalising skills seems entirely driven by changes in returns to background characteristics. Lastly, we document that socio-emotional skills measured at an earlier age than in most of the existing literature are significant predictors of health and health behaviours. Our results show the importance of formally testing comparability of measurements to study skills differences across groups, and in general point to the role of inequalities in the early years for the accumulation of health and human capital across the life course.
我们研究了出生间隔30年的两组英国队列人群在生命早期社会情感技能方面的不平等变化情况。我们使用两种经过验证的测量儿童行为的工具构建了可比量表，并确定了社会情感技能的两个维度：“内化”和“外化”。利用因子分析方面的最新方法进展，我们确定了这些早期技能在不同队列间不平等情况的可比性，但在平均水平上不具有可比性。我们首次记录到，社会情感技能方面的不平等在不同队列间有所增加，尤其是男孩以及处于分布底端的人群。我们还正式分解了不平等加剧的根源，发现构成变化解释了外化技能不平等上升的一半。另一方面，内化技能不平等的加剧似乎完全是由背景特征回报的变化所驱动的。最后，我们记录到，与大多数现有文献相比，在更早年龄测量的社会情感技能是健康和健康行为的重要预测指标。我们的研究结果表明，正式检验测量的可比性对于研究不同群体间技能差异非常重要，总体而言，这也指出了早年不平等在整个生命历程中健康和人力资本积累方面的作用。
