We provide evidence on the relationship between cognitive and non-cognitive abilities and earnings in Germany. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, we employ two ultra-short IQ-tests and several measures of personality traits, namely locus of control, reciprocity and all basic items from the Five Factor Personality Inventory. Our estimates suggest a positive effect of so-calle...

Genes account for increasing proportions of variation in cognitive ability across development, but the mechanisms underlying these increases remain unclear. We conducted a meta-analysis of longitudinal behavioral genetic studies spanning infancy to adolescence. We identified relevant data from 16 articles with 11 unique samples containing a total of 11,500 twin and sibling pairs who were all re...

Social inequalities in UK educational outcomes continue to persist despite improvements in recent years. However, studies that examine these inequalities fail to account for differences in prior cognitive ability. We seek to determine the influence of cognitive ability on educational outcomes and the extent of socio-economic disparities in education across a wide range of indicators while accou...

Although trends in many physical characteristics and cognitive capabilities of modern humans are well-documented, less is known about how personality traits have evolved over time. We analyze data from a standardized personality test administered to 79% of Finnish men born between 1962 and 1976 (n = 419,523) and find steady increases in personality traits that predict higher income in later lif...

The first attempt to measure cognitive estimation abilities was made by Shallice and Evans (1978), who developed the Cognitive Estimation Test, consisting of a set of questions which requires appropriate reasoning abilities. The authors stressed the link between executive functions and estimation skills, finding out that patients with frontal lobe damages performed poorly on the proposed task; ...

We aim to disentangle the relative impact of (i) cognitive ability and (ii) education on health and mortality using a structural equation model suggested by Conti et al. (2010). We extend their model by allowing for a duration dependent variable (mortality), and an ordinal educational variable. Data come from a Dutch cohort born between 1937 and 1941, including detailed measures of cognitive ab...

Humans rely on internal representations to solve a variety of spatial problems including navigation. Navigation employs specific information to compose a representation of space that is distinct from that obtained through static bird’s-eye or horizontal perspectives. The ability to point to on-route locations, off-route locations, and the route origin illustrates the unique types of spatial kno...

Increased age in adulthood is associated with systematically more negative cognitive change, but relatively little is known about the nature of change at different ages. The present study capitalized on the hierarchical structure of cognitive abilities to investigate possible age differences in the level at which change operates. Reductions in the longitudinal associations between test scores w...