Abstract
Previous research has documented significantly larger income-related gaps in children’s early cognitive development in the United States than in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. In this study, we investigate the extent to which this is a result of a more unequal income distribution in the United States. We show that although incomes are more unequal in the United States than elsewhere, a given difference in real income is associated with larger gaps in child test scores there than in the three other countries. In particular, high-income families in the United States appear to translate the same amount of financial resources into greater cognitive advantages relative to the middle-income group than those in the other countries studied. We compare inequalities in other kinds of family characteristics and show that higher income levels are disproportionately concentrated among families with advantageous demographic characteristics in the United States. Our results underline the fact that the same degree of income inequality can translate into different disparities in child development, depending on the distribution of other family resources.
Highlights
It has long been established in the intergenerational mobility literature that social mobility is lower in the United States than in many advanced nations (Corak 2006; Solon 2002)
Our work using income groups defined in absolute terms, using the U.S income distribution, suggests that higher-income parents in the United States translate a given difference in household income into a greater advantage in terms of children’s school readiness than affluent parents in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada
Higherincome children in the United States are disproportionately likely to live with both biological parents and to have mothers who are able to limit the time they devote to paid work, potentially leading to benefits for children via higher levels of nurturing, stimulating parental interactions, and better parental psychological well-being
Summary
It has long been established in the intergenerational mobility literature that social mobility is lower in the United States than in many advanced nations (Corak 2006; Solon 2002). A large body of work has compared the income-related gradients in offspring’s income or earnings across different countries, states, and cohorts (e.g., Bjorklund and Jäntti 2009; Blanden et al 2004; Chetty et al 2014; Corak 2006; Lee and Solon 2009; Solon 2002) This literature has established that substantial differences in intergenerational income mobility exist across societies with, for example, the United States typically displaying greater income persistence and less mobility across generations than a number of Western European countries and, in particular, the Nordic countries (Corak 2013; Jäntti et al 2006). International large-scale assessments, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment, have long enabled comparisons at older ages, but large-scale nationally representative direct measures of young children’s cognitive and socioemotional skills, accompanied by detailed measures of parental SES, have been rare. Bradbury et al (2012, 2015a) addressed this gap by drawing together and harmonizing data from independent nationally representative cohort studies from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada
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