About this Event
Johnson Graduate School-Management, 106 Sage Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-6201, USA
Germán Reyes, Cornell University, PhD Student
Cognitive Endurance, Talent Selection, and the Labor Market Returns to Human Capital
Cognitive endurance—the ability to sustain performance on a cognitively-demanding task over time—is believed to be a crucial productivity determinant. However, a lack of data on this variable has limited researchers' ability to understand its role in college and labor markets. This paper uses college-admission-exam records from 15 million Brazilian high school students to measure cognitive endurance based on changes in performance throughout the exam. By exploiting exogenous variation in the order of exam questions, I show that students are 7.1 percentage points (or 18.7%) more likely to correctly answer a given question when it appears at the beginning of the day versus the end. Motivated by this result, I develop a portable method to decompose test scores into fatigue-adjusted ability and cognitive endurance. I then merge these measures into a higher education census and the earnings records of the universe of Brazilian formal-sector workers to quantify the association between endurance and long-run outcomes. I find that cognitive endurance has a statistically and economically significant wage return. Regression-adjusting for fatigue-adjusted ability and other student characteristics, a one-standard-deviation higher endurance predicts a 5.4% wage increase. I also document positive associations between endurance and college attendance, college quality, college graduation, firm quality, and other outcomes. Finally, I examine how the exam length affects the sorting of students to colleges due to systematic differences in endurance across students. I estimate that an exam reform that reduces the test length would reduce income-based test-score gaps and increase the predictive validity of the exam for long-run outcomes. I discuss the implications of these findings for the use of cognitive assessments for talent selection and investments in interventions that build cognitive endurance.
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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 community
Note: 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.