This paper distills and extends recent research on the economics of human development and social mobility. It summarizes the evidence from diverse literatures on the importance of early life conditions in shaping multiple life skills and the evidence on critical and sensitive investment periods for shaping different skills. It presents economic models that rationalize the evidence and unify the treatment effect and family influence literatures. The evidence on the empirical and policy importance of credit constraints in forming skills is examined. There is little support for the claim that untargeted income transfer policies to poor families significantly boost child outcomes. Mentoring, parenting, and attachment are essential features of successful families and interventions to shape skills at all stages of childhood. The next wave of family studies will better capture the active role of the emerging autonomous child in learning and responding to the actions of parents, mentors and teachers.

The Economics of Human Development and Social Mobility

This book is the classic source of empirical information on the patterns of occupational achievement in American society. Based on an unusually comprehensive set of data, it is renowned for its pioneering methods of statistical analysis as well as for its far-reaching conclusions about social stratification and occupational mobility in the United States. The American Occupational Structure received the Sorokin Award of the American Sociological Association in recognition of its significant contribution to the social sciences.

The American Occupational Structure

The prevalence of private tutoring is often noted in the literature on education in East Asia. Empirical evidence concerning the causes and consequences of private tutoring, however, is sparse, especially for China. In this article, we draw upon data from the 2010 China Family Panel Studies to explore whether children’s tutoring experiences are influenced by family background and whether private tutoring benefits children’s educational performance. Our empirical analyses show that higher parental education, higher family income, and fewer siblings are all associated with a higher likelihood of private tutoring and higher levels of spending on it. Furthermore, private tutoring and spending on tutoring are predictive of higher verbal and math performances, although the difference in math performance between children who received private tutoring and those who did not is statistically insignificant after controlling for family background.

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Family Background, Private Tutoring, and Children’s Educational Performance in Contemporary China

Prenatal exposure to sand and dust storms and children's cognitive function in China: a quasi-experimental study.

With the rapid expansion of higher education, educational meritocracy has received both applause and skepticism among scholars, citizens, and policy-makers. Focusing on China’s urban-rura...

Unfulfilled Promise of Educational Meritocracy? Academic Ability and China’s Urban-Rural Gap in Access to Higher Education

In this paper, we describe the measurement of cognitive ability in the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), especially for verbal skill, mathematical skill, memory, and quantitative reasoning The available CFPS cognitive measurements can be useful for studies on the importance of cognitive ability in many substantive domains of interest Using the CFPS data, we show that measures of cognitive ability are clearly related to key demographic and social characteristics, such as age, gender, education, and hukou status We also illustrate how cognitive ability influences school performance and deviant behaviors among children, income and political capital among adults, and daily functioning among the elderly

Guoying Huang

Papers

Cognitive Ability: Social Correlates and Consequences in Contemporary China