Are Young People's Educational Outcomes Linked to Their Sense of Control?

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. We find that young people with a more internal locus of control have a higher probability of finishing secondary school and, conditional on completion, meeting the requirements to obtain a university entrance rank. Moreover, those with an internal locus of control who obtain a university entrance rank achieve somewhat higher rankings than do their peers who have a more external locus of control. Not surprisingly, there is a negative relationship between growing up in disadvantage and educational outcomes. However, this effect does not appear to operate indirectly by increasing the likelihood of having a more external locus of control. In particular, we find no significant relationship between family welfare history and young people's locus of control.JEL Classification: I38, J24, H31

The effect of personality traits on subject choice and performance in high school: Evidence from an English cohort

“…One obvious concern in performing this type of analysis if that growing up in a deprived socio-economic environment may directly affect personality of young people. Previous research has investigated whether, for example, welfare receipt can influence non-cognitive traits (Baron and Cobb-Clark, 2010) who investigate this issue using a model in which locus of control is regressed against a series of measures of socio-economic disadvantage and their results show little evidence that young disadvantaged have a more external locus of control once family demographics and background characteristics are taken into account.…”

“…Baron and Cobb-Clark (2010) Youth in Focus OLS, Probit Ordered probit A standard deviation increase in locus of control increases the probability of high school graduation by 4.5 p.p. Coleman and Deleire (2003) NELS Probit A standard deviation increase in youths' sense of control results in a 2 to 3pp increase in the probability of completing high school.…”

“…Borghans et al (2008) show that, in an experimental setting, people with internal locus of control respond less to financial incentives when allocating effort to cognitive tasks, probably because they are more highly motivated. Finally, Baron and Cobb-Clark (2010) analyse the link between locus of control and high school graduation and university attendance using a recent cohort of Australian youths. Their work shows that people with internal locus of control are more likely to invest in their education and they do not find any significant relationship between family welfare history and young person's locus of control.…”

“…We use this information to investigate the role of different personality traits on choice of study and performance. The existing literature is mostly focused on the broad effect of personality on education, using indicators such as years of schooling, or college graduation (Heckman et al 2006;Coleman and Deleire, 2003;Cebi, 2007) and focusing on the role of one specific personality trait, such as locus of control or conscientiousness (Baron and Cobb-Clark, 2010). Thirdly we use propensity score matching (PSM) to investigate the relationship between personality and High School performance as well as OLS estimation, and we examine the robustness of our results using the methodology proposed by Altonji et al (2005) (the AET method).…”

Locus of Control and low-wage mobility

“…Non-cognitive skills help to explain the observed variance in earnings (see Heckman et al, 2006, Müller and Plug, 2006and Groves, 2005 for evidence from the US; Heineck and Anger, 2010 for evidence from Germany; Heineck, 2011 andGroves, 2005 for evidence from the UK), educational outcomes (Barón and Cobb-Clark, 2010) and occupational choices (Antecol and Cobb-Clark, forthcoming). Blázquez Cuesta and Budría (2012) show that non-cognitive skills affect unemployment persistence, and Caliendo et al (2010) find that non-cognitive skills influence job search behaviour.…”