Tuomas Pekkarinen

Global Sex Differences in Test Score Variability

D o boys and girls differ in their intellectual and cognitive abilities and, if so, in what way? These questions have raised considerable debate, both in terms of average performance and in terms of variability around the average. Empirical research on gender differences in achievements produces mixed conclusions, with some evidence that favors boys and some that favors girls (1–4). In many countries, girls show superior performance in school examinations, which is also reflected in higher rates of attendance in tertiary education. In addition, girls have been improving their position relative to boys (5, 6). In countries with a more gender-equal culture, the gender gap that is usually in favor of boys in average mathematics test scores is erased or even reversed in favor of girls (7). At the same time, some research focuses on the notion that there are more males at the upper end of the distributions of educational and professional success (8). Oft-cited examples include there being more male than female Nobel Prize winners and the inequity of wages in the labor market in favor of males (9, 10). Studies of talented individuals who succeed at the very highest levels, especially in science, highlight substantial male overrepresentation (11). These outcomes can be generated by various kinds of distributions describing the educational and intellectual make-up of boys and girls. Differences in the gender composition of the high-scoring group can be a consequence of gender differences in the mean or variance of the test scores or both. Given that recent research has shown that gender

School Tracking and Development of Cognitive Skills

We evaluate the effects of the school system on mathematical, verbal, and logical reasoning skills using data from the Finnish comprehensive school reform that abolished the two-track school system. We use a difference-in-differences approach that exploits the gradual implementation across the country. Cognitive skills are measured using test scores from the Finnish Army Basic Skills Test. The reform had small positive effects on verbal test scores but no effect on the mean performance in the arithmetic or logical reasoning tests. However, the reform significantly improved the scores of the students whose parents had less than a high school education.

Gender Differences in Educational Attainment: Evidence on the Role of Tracking from a Finnish Quasi-experiment

This paper studies the relationship between the timing of tracking of pupils into vocational and academic secondary education and gender differences in educational attainment and income. We argue that in a system that streams students into vocational and academic tracks relatively late (age 15-16), girls are more likely to choose the academic track than boys because of gender differences in the timing of puberty. We exploit the Finnish comprehensive school reform of the 1970s to analyze this hypothesis. This reform postponed the tracking of students from the age of 10-11 to 15-16 and was adopted gradually by municipalities so that we can observe members of the same cohorts in both systems. We find that the postponement of the tracking age increased gender differences in the probability of choosing the academic secondary education and in the probability of continuing into academic tertiary education. The reform had particularily negative effects on boys from non-academic family backgrounds. Finally, the reform decreased the gender wage gap in adult income by four percentage points.

Performance Pay and Earnings: Evidence from Personnel Records

This paper examines the earnings effects of performance pay using linked employee-employer panel data from Finlands metal industry for 1990–2000. The authors estimate the effects of performance pay contracts in the presence of individual and firm unobserved heterogeneity as well as in tasks of different complexity. Unobservable firm characteristics explain about 40% of the variance in the use of performance pay. Performance pay workers earned substantially more than fixed rate workers, a finding that persists even in analyses that use for identification only those workers who changed firms (and contracts) due to an establishment closure. There is also evidence of a strong, negative relationship between job complexity and the incentive effects of performance pay. Finally, several “quasi-experiments” show that when one plant underwent a compensation regime change but other highly similar plants in the same firm did not, workers in the “treatment” plant gained substantial earnings premiums.

Secular rise in economically valuable personality traits

Significance The secular rise in intelligence across birth cohorts is one of the most widely documented facts in psychology. This finding is important because intelligence is a key predictor of many outcomes such as education, occupation, and income. Although noncognitive skills may be equally important, there is little evidence on the long-term trends in noncognitive skills due to lack of data on consistently measured noncognitive skills of representative populations of successive cohorts. Using test score data based on an unchanged test taken by the population of Finnish military conscripts, we find steady positive trends in personality traits that are associated with high income. These trends are similar in magnitude and economic importance to the simultaneous rise in intelligence. Although trends in many physical characteristics and cognitive capabilities of modern humans are well-documented, less is known about how personality traits have evolved over time. We analyze data from a standardized personality test administered to 79% of Finnish men born between 1962 and 1976 (n = 419,523) and find steady increases in personality traits that predict higher income in later life. The magnitudes of these trends are similar to the simultaneous increase in cognitive abilities, at 0.2–0.6 SD during the 15-y window. When anchored to earnings, the change in personality traits amounts to a 12% increase. Both personality and cognitive ability have consistent associations with family background, but the trends are similar across groups defined by parental income, parental education, number of siblings, and rural/urban status. Nevertheless, much of the trends in test scores can be attributed to changes in the family background composition, namely 33% for personality and 64% for cognitive ability. These composition effects are mostly due to improvements in parents’ education. We conclude that there is a “Flynn effect” for personality that mirrors the original Flynn effect for cognitive ability in magnitude and practical significance but is less driven by compositional changes in family background.

The Evolution of Social Mobility: Norway during the Twentieth Century

We document trends in social mobility in Norway using intergenerational income elasticities, the associations between the income percentiles of fathers and sons, and brother correlations. The results of all approaches suggest that social mobility increased substantially between cohorts born in the early 1930s and the early 1940s. Father–son associations remained stable for cohorts born after World War II, while brother correlations continued to decline. The relationship between father and son income percentile ranks is highly non‐linear for early cohorts, but it approaches linearity over time. We discuss increasing educational attainment among low‐ and middle‐income families as a possible mechanism underlying these trends.

Education and allocation of skills in Tunisia: evidence from an education reform

AbstractAn often cited explanation for the weak growth effects of education in developing countries is the misallocation of educated workers to inefficient activities in the public sector. This paper assesses the strength of this argument by studying the effect of educational attainment on employment status of Tunisian men. We exploit policy changes that restricted access to secondary education in the 1970’s as an instrument for education and use data from 2004 Tunisian census as well as 2010 Labor Force Survey to estimate the effect of education on working in different sectors and within specific occupational categories. Consistently with the misallocation argument, we find that education increases employment, but that this increase is concentrated either in relatively low skill white collar occupations or in the public sector. Given that our instrument probably affected the academically weaker students this pattern of results suggests that the public sector might inefficiently reward titles.