Abstract
We examine changes in inequality in socio-emotional skills very early in life in two British cohorts born 30 years apart. We construct socio-emotional scales comparable across cohorts for both boys and girls, using two validated instruments for the measurement of child behaviour. We identify two dimensions of socio-emotional skills for each cohort: ‘internalising’ and ‘externalising’, related to the ability of children to focus their concentration and to engage in interpersonal activities, respectively. 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 these early skills has increased across cohorts, especially for boys and at the bottom of the distribution. We also document changes in conditional skills gaps across cohorts. We find an increase in the socio- emotional skills gap in the younger cohort for children born to mothers with higher socio-economic status (education and employment), and to mothers who smoked during pregnancy. The increase in inequality in early socio-emotional skills is particularly pronounced for boys. On the other hand, we find a decline in the skills gradient for children without a father figure in the household. Lastly, we document that socio-emotional skills measured at a much earlier age than in most of the existing literature are significant predictors of outcomes both in adolescence and adulthood, in particular 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.
Highlights
Human capital is a key determinant of economic growth and performance and of the resources an individual creates and controls over the life cycle
In this paper we have studied inequality in a dimension of human capital which has received limited attention in the literature so far: socio-emotional skills very early in life
We have focused on the measurements of these skills at age 5 in two British cohorts born 30 years apart: the one of children born in 1970 (British Cohort Study, BCS)
Summary
Human capital is a key determinant of economic growth and performance and of the resources an individual creates and controls over the life cycle. Human capital is important for various determinants of individual well-being, ranging from health to life satisfaction. There is growing consensus on the fact that human capital is a multidimensional object, with different domains playing different roles in labour market as well as in the determination of other outcomes, including the process of human development. It is recognised that human capital is the output of a very persistent process, where early years inputs play an important and persistent role. There are still large gaps in our knowledge of the process of human capital development. These gaps are partly driven by the scarcity of high quality longitudinal data measuring the evolution over the life cycle of different dimension of human capital. Even when data are available in different contexts, their comparability is problematic
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