| 来源类型 | Working Paper |
| 规范类型 | 报告 |
| DOI | 10.3386/w30133 |
| 来源ID | Working Paper 30133 |
| Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital | |
| Christina L. Brown; Supreet Kaur; Geeta Kingdon; Heather Schofield | |
| 发表日期 | 2022-06-13 |
| 出版年 | 2022 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | 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 during 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 intellectual 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 effortful 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. |
| 主题 | Microeconomics ; Behavioral Economics ; Health, Education, and Welfare ; Education ; Development and Growth ; Development |
| URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w30133 |
| 来源智库 | National Bureau of Economic Research (United States) |
| 引用统计 | |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/587805 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Christina L. Brown,Supreet Kaur,Geeta Kingdon,et al. Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital. 2022. |
| 条目包含的文件 | ||||||
| 文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
| w30133.pdf（1315KB） | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 | ||
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