Essays on children's non-cognitive skills and health.

Autor/in	Peter, Frauke
Titel	Essays on children's non-cognitive skills and health. Gefälligkeitsübersetzung: Aufsätze über nicht-kognitive Fähigkeiten und Gesundheit bei Kindern.
Quelle	Berlin (2013), 246 S. PDF als Volltext kostenfreie Datei Link als defekt meldenVerfügbarkeit Berlin, Freie Univ., Diss., 2013.
Beigaben	Literaturangaben
Zusatzinformation	Forschungsdaten, Studiendetails und Erhebungsinstrumente
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	online; Monographie
URN	urn:nbn:de:kobv:188-fudissthesis000000093867-3
Schlagwörter	Bildungserfolg; Bildungsforschung; Sekundäranalyse; Persönlichkeitsmerkmal; Selbstbestimmung; Verhalten; Frühe Kindheit; Jugend; Familie; Mutter; Kind; Kinderbetreuung; Gesundheit; Sozioökonomischer Faktor; Arbeitslosigkeit; Einflussfaktor; Deutschland
Abstract	The dissertation deals with changes in family resources and its effect on children's cognitive and non-cognitive skills in early childhood and in adolescence. Skill development is influenced by different environmental factors - amongst others the family and early education and care outside the home. Predisposition and social influences play a crucial role (naturenurture debate). Vast studies show that the family environment is an important factor for children's development in early childhood. All in all the literature in Education Economics mainly examines children's educational attainment or school track choices as outcomes. Other studies analyze PISA results as indicator for children's development. In recent years studies in the field of the economics of education, inspired by the work of Nobel Prize winner James Heckman, have started to differentiate skills within the skill formation process of children's development. Non-cognitive skills are not only crucial in explaining education outcomes but are an outcome in itself. International studies moreover state that human capital significantly accumulates in early childhood. In three chapters based on representative survey data influences of different environmental factors on children's non-cognitive skills are assessed: family instability, involuntary job loss, and day care quality. The dissertation uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and administrative data from the statistics of child and youth welfare (Kinder- und Jugendhilfestatistik). The analysis of changes in children's environment including structural quality of day care centers and non-cognitive development uses various micro-econometric methods. Different micro-econometric techniques are used to assess a potential causal relationship with children's non-cognitive skills, which requires addressing selection bias, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity. The applied techniques solving these problems are amongst others sibling fixed effect models, propensity score matching, and conditional difference-in-differences matching. The results of the dissertation show that non-cognitive skills of infants and adolescents and infants' health are influenced by changes in children's environment, i.e. family instability, involuntary job loss, and structural quality of day care centers. These findings are relevant for today's family and education policies. They emphasize from an education economics perspective that changes in a child's environment should not be neglected. In addition the results of the dissertation emphasize interesting starting points for research in Education and Family Economics. The findings demonstrate that it matters to differentiate children's outcomes. For example, a Norwegian study finds a positive but insignificant effect of maternal involuntary job loss on children's academic achievement at age sixteen, whereas this dissertation finds a significant negative effect of maternal involuntary job loss on children's non-cognitive skills. By complementing the existing literature in Education Economics, the results of this dissertation suggest that it might be crucial to differentiate between cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes. (DIPF/Author).
Erfasst von	DIPF \| Leibniz-Institut für Bildungsforschung und Bildungsinformation, Frankfurt am Main
Update	2013/3