Ethnic and Academic Identity: What Role for Children’s Scholastic Effort?

Recent scholarly analysis has focussed on the role that ethnic identity plays in individual economic performances and particularly on how the identification with the culture of home and host countries influences immigrants’ and their children’s labour market outcomes. This paper focuses on the influence of ethnic and personal identity on adolescents’ scholastic effort. We partly draw on Akerlof and Kranton’s contributions in that they recognize the influence of social identity on children’s choice of effort. Nevertheless, in our model, ethnic and personal traits directly determines scholastic effort, which is in line with a strand of the psychology literature. An empirical model consistent with the theoretical one is estimated using the 1970 British Cohort Study, which contains information on how pupils see school and, hence, allows to derive an accurate measures of individual scholastic effort. It provides further useful information in order to identify relevant explanatory factors like the locus of control-characterizing personal traits—and to control for potentially confounding factors. The results corroborate the hypothesis that ethnicity and personal traits other than the socio-economic variables usually considered in the literature—play an important role in determining effort in school.