The relationship between completed education and adult cognition is investigated using data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey. We compare adult siblings to account for shared, difficult-to-measure characteristics that likely affect this relationship, including genetics and parental preferences and investments. After establishing the importance of shared family background factors, we document substantively large, significant impacts of education on cognition in models with sibling fixed effects. In contrast, the strong positive correlation between education and adult height is reduced to zero in models with sibling fixed effects, suggesting little contamination in the education-height association beyond factors common to siblings.
Authors
- Acknowledgements & Disclosure
- Financial support from the National Institute on Aging (K99/R00 AG070274 [Zhang]) and Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2C HD050924 [Frankenberg] and T32 HD091058 [Zhang]) is gratefully acknowledged The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3386/w32362
- Published in
- United States of America