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Behavioral Economics Workshop: Heather Schofield

Tuesday, September 6, 2022 at 11:15am to 12:45pm

Sage Hall, 141
Johnson Graduate School-Management, 106 Sage Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-6201, USA

Heather Schofield, University of Pennsylvania

Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital, (joint w/Christina Brown, Supreet Kaur, and Geeta Kindon)

Abstract:  Schooling may build human capital not only by teaching academic skills, but by expanding the capacity for cognition itself. We focus specifically on cognitive endurance: the ability to sustain effortful mental activity over a continuous stretch of time. As motivation, we document that globally and in the US, the poor exhibit cognitive fatigue more quickly than the rich across field settings; they also attend schools that offer fewer opportunities to practice thinking for continuous stretches. Using a field experiment with 1,600 Indian primary school students, we randomly increase the amount of time students spend in sustained cognitive activity dur-ing the school day—using either math problems (mimicking good schooling) or non-academic games (providing a pure test of our mechanism). Each approach markedly improves cognitive endurance: students show 22% less decline in performance over time when engaged in intel-lectual activities—listening comprehension, academic problems, or IQ tests. They also exhibit increased attentiveness in the classroom and score higher on psychological measures of sustained attention. Moreover, each treatment improves students’ school performance by 0.09 standard deviations. This indicates that the experience of e˙ortful thinking itself—even when devoid of any subject content—increases the ability to accumulate traditional human capital. Finally, we complement these results with quasi-experimental variation indicating that an additional year of schooling improves cognitive endurance, but only in higher-quality schools. Our findings suggest that schooling disparities may further disadvantage poor children by hampering the development of a core mental capacity. JEL Codes: I24, I25, D90, O12

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We strongly encourage in-person attendance in 141 Sage. However, we recognize that there will be Covid-related reasons why people sometimes cannot attend in-person, and thus a remote attendance option will also be available.

If you are interested in participating remotely in this workshop, please register at:https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwude2hpzwtGt2W5EsLWbuc3WQGg7OyWUFE

Note: Registration is limited to the Cornell communityNote: If you have previously registered for the Fall 2022 Behavioral Economics Workshop, there is no need to re-register—you will use the same Behavioral Economics Workshop link for the entire semester.

Note: The Behavioral Economics Workshop and the BEDR Workshop use separate links; hence, you still must register for the Behavioral Economics Workshop even if you have already registered for the BEDR Workshop.

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Event Type

Class/ Workshop, Seminar

Departments

Economics

Tags

EconSeminar, EconBehave, economics

Contact E-Mail

uab1@cornell.edu

Contact Name

Ulrike Kroeller

Contact Phone

6072554254

Speaker

Heather Schofield

Speaker Affiliation

University of Pennsylvania

Open To

Cornell Economics Community (List Serve Members)