IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rco/dpaper/249.html

Culture and Student Achievement: The Intertwined Roles of Patience and Risk-Taking

Author

Listed:
  • Hanushek, Eric A.

    (Stanford University)

  • Kinne, Lavinia

    (ifo Institute)

  • Lergetporer, Philipp

    (ifo Institute)

  • Woessmann, Ludger

    (LMU Munich & ifo Institute)

Abstract

Patience and risk-taking – two cultural traits that steer intertemporal decision-making – are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international differences in student achievement, we combine PISA tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find that opposing effects of patience (positive) and risk-taking (negative) together account for two-thirds of the cross-country variation in student achievement. In an identification strategy addressing unobserved residence-country features, we find similar results when assigning migrant students their country-of-origin cultural traits in models with residence-country fixed effects. Associations of culture with family and school inputs suggest that both may act as channels.

Suggested Citation

  • Hanushek, Eric A. & Kinne, Lavinia & Lergetporer, Philipp & Woessmann, Ludger, 2020. "Culture and Student Achievement: The Intertwined Roles of Patience and Risk-Taking," Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series 249, CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition.
    • Handle: RePEc:rco:dpaper:249
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://rationality-and-competition.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/249.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Eric A. Hanushek & Lavinia Kinne & Philipp Lergetporer & Ludger Wößmann, 2020. "Der Einfluss von Geduld und Risikobereitschaft auf internationale Unterschiede in schulischen Leistungen," ifo Schnelldienst, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, vol. 73(10), pages 33-36, October.
    3. Isabella Dobrescu & Alberto Motta & Richard Holden & Adrian Piccoli, 2021. "Cultural Context in Standardized Tests," Discussion Papers 2021-08, School of Economics, The University of New South Wales.
    4. Angerer, Silvia & Bolvashenkova, Jana & Glätzle-Rützler, Daniela & Lergetporer, Philipp & Sutter, Matthias, 2023. "Children’s patience and school-track choices several years later: Linking experimental and field data," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 220(C).
    5. Etienne Dagorn & David Masclet & Thierry Penard, 2022. "The Behavioral Determinants of School Achievement: A Lab in the Field Experiment in Middle School," Economics Working Paper Archive (University of Rennes & University of Caen) 2022-05, Center for Research in Economics and Management (CREM), University of Rennes, University of Caen and CNRS.
    6. Hanson, Gordon & Liu, Chen, 2023. "Immigration and occupational comparative advantage," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 145(C).
    7. Davoli, Maddalena & Rodríguez-Planas, Núria, 2021. "Preferences, Financial Literacy, and Economic Development," IZA Discussion Papers 14759, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    8. Pablo Bencomo-Mesa & Gustavo A. Marrero & Gabriela Sicilia, 2025. "Inequality of Opportunity in Education in Spanish Regions: A Machine Learning Approach," Hacienda Pública Española / Review of Public Economics, IEF, vol. 252(1), pages 113-162, March.
    9. Gustavo A. Marrero & Juan C. Palomino & Gabriela Sicilia, 2024. "Inequality of opportunity in educational achievement in Western Europe: contributors and channels," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 22(2), pages 383-410, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • Z10 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rco:dpaper:249. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Viviana Lalli (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://rationality-and-competition.de .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.