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Papers in this Special Issue and elsewhere consistently find a strong relationship between children’s cognitive abilities and their parents’ socio-economic position (SEP). Most studies seeking to explain the paths through which SEP affects cognitive skills suffer from a potentially serious omitted variables problem, as they are unable to account for an important determinant of children’s cognitive abilities, namely parental cognitive ability. A range of econometric strategies have been employed to overcome this issue, but in this paper, we adopt the very simple (but rarely available) route of using data that includes a range of parental characteristics measured during the parents’ childhood, such as parental cognitive ability and social skills. In line with previous work on the intergenerational transmission of cognitive skills, we find that parental cognitive ability is a significant predictor of children’s cognitive ability; moreover, it explains one sixth of the socio-economic gap in those skills, even after controlling for a rich set of demographic, attitudinal and behavioural factors. Despite the importance of parental cognitive ability in explaining children’s cognitive ability, however, the additional parental characteristics we examine here do not alter our impression of the relative importance of other factors in explaining the socio-economic gap in cognitive skills. This is reassuring for studies that are unable to control for such characteristics. JEL

It is well known that children growing up in poor families leave school with considerably lower qualifications than children from better off backgrounds. Using a simple decomposition analysis, we show that around two thirds of the socio-economic gap in attainment at age 16 can be accounted for by long-run family background characteristics and prior ability, suggesting that circumstances and investments made considerably earlier in the child's life explain the majority of the gap in test scores between young people from rich and poor families. However, we also find that differences in the attitudes and behaviours of young people and their parents during the teenage years play a key role in explaining the rich-poor gap in GCSE attainment: together, they explain a further quarter of the gap at age 16, and the majority of the small increase in this gap between ages 11 and 16. On this basis, our results suggest that while the most effective policies in terms of raising the attainment of young people from poor families are likely to be those enacted before children reach secondary school, policies that aim to reduce differences in attitudes and behaviours between the poorest children and those from better-off backgrounds during the teenage years may also make a significant contribution towards lowering the gap in achievement between young people from the richest and poorest families at age 16.

Higher education (HE) participation has expanded dramatically in England over the last half century; however, access to HE amongst particular groups of students remains a major policy concern. This report makes use of newly linked administrative data to better understand the determinants of participation in HE - and participation in high status universities - amongst those facing socio-economic disadvantage, those from poorly educated families and ethnic minorities. It is unique in being able to follow a particular cohort of children (all state school children in England in Year 11 in 2001-02) from age 11 right through to HE participation at age 18 (in 2004-05) or age 19 (in 2005-06). The findings documented in this report show that while there are large raw gaps in HE participation rates by socio-economic status, these differences disappear once controls for prior attainment are included. This suggests that it is not barriers arising at the point of entry into HE (e.g. borrowing constraints) that are most problematic, but poor attainment in secondary schools. Indeed, if results can be improved between age 11 and age 16, those from poorer backgrounds are at least as likely to go on to university as their more advantaged peers. By contrast, most ethnic minority groups are now significantly more likely to participate in HE than their White British counterparts.

This paper examines the socio-economic consequences of teenage motherhood for a cohort of British women born in 1970. We employ a number of methods to control for observed and unobserved differences between women who gave birth as a teenager and those who do not. We present results from conventional linear regression models, a propensity score matching estimator, and an instrumental variable estimator that uses miscarriage data to control for unobserved characteristics influencing selection into teenage motherhood. We consider the effects on equivalised family income at age 30, and its constituent parts. We find significant negative effects of teenage motherhood using methods that control only for observed characteristics using linear regression or matching methods. However once unobserved heterogeneity is also taken into account, the evidence for large negative effects becomes much less clear-cut. We look at older and younger teenage mothers separately and find that the negative effects are not necessarily stronger for teenagers falling pregnant before age 18 compared with those falling pregnant between 18 and 20, which could further suggest that some of the negative effects of teenage motherhood are temporary.