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Culture and Student Achievement: The Intertwined Roles of Patience and Risk-Taking

Eric A. Hanushek,
Lavinia Kinne,
Philipp Lergetporer,
Ludger Woessmann

Patience and risk-taking – two cultural traits that steer intertemporal decision-making – are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international differences in student achievement, we combine PISA tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find that opposing effects of patience (positive) and risk-taking (negative) together account for two-thirds of the cross-country variation in student achievement. In an identification strategy addressing unobserved residence-country features, we find similar results when assigning migrant students their country-of-origin cultural traits in models with residence-country fixed effects. Associations of culture with family and school inputs suggest that both may act as channels.

Keywords
culture, patience, risk-taking, preferences, intertemporal decision-making, international student achievement, PISA
Education level
K-12 Education
Topics
Families and Communities
Tags
International and comparative,
Race, ethnicity, and education
Download 07/2020
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/sqz2-km76
EdWorkingPaper suggested citation:
Hanushek, Eric A., Lavinia Kinne, Philipp Lergetporer, and Ludger Woessmann. (). Culture and Student Achievement: The Intertwined Roles of Patience and Risk-Taking. (EdWorkingPaper: -253). Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University: https://doi.org/10.26300/sqz2-km76

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