Dimensions of cognitive skills are potentially important but often neglected determinants of the central economic outcomes that shape overall well-being over the life course. There exists enormous variation among households in their rates of wealth accumulation, their holdings of financial...

This paper summarizes recent evidence on what achievement tests measure; how achievement tests relate to other measures of cognitive ability like IQ and grades; the important skills that achievement tests miss or mismeasure, and how much these skills matter in life. Achievement tests miss, or...

This paper argues that endogenous restructuring processes within firms towards productivityenhancing human resource activities, triggered by advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) and rising supply of educated workers, are typically associated with higher demand for...

Previous work by the authors suggested that during the 1970s and 1980s, a person?s early cognitive ability became a less important determinant of his or her eventual educational achievement. Furthermore, over the same time period, family background started to have a greater impact on a person?s...

In a meritocratic society an individual's economic success is determined by their ability, not by their parents' socio-economic status. We assess whether meritocracy has increased in both the British education system and labour market. The richness of our longitudinal data enables us to look at...

This paper analyses the welfare effects of price restrictions on private contracting in a world where agents have a limited cognitive ability. People compute the costs and benefits of entering a transaction with an error. The government knows the distribution of true costs and benefits as well...

The most fundamental solution concepts in Game Theory Nash equilibrium, backward induction, and iterated elimination of dominated strategies are based on the assumption that people are capable of predicting others' actions. These concepts require people to be able to view the game from the other...

This study investigates how maternal employment is related to the outcomes of 10 and 11 year olds, controlling for a wide variety of child, mother and family characteristics. The results suggest that limited amounts of work by mothers benefit youths who are relatively disadvantaged and even long...

This paper reports results from a unique two-stage experiment designed to examine the spillover effects of optimism and pessimism. In stage 1, we induce optimism or pessimism onto subjects by randomly assigning a high or low piece rate for performing a cognitive task. We find that participants...