We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over time, and along the within-country distribution. Extensive sensitivity analyses of cross-country grow...

A longitudinal study design is used to find out whether health and health behaviours at age 12-16 predict educational level in early adulthood. The purpose is to study direct (based on health) and indirect (based on health behaviours) health-related selection mechanisms in adolescence. These mechanisms contribute to the allocation of people into various educational positions and thus to the cre...

When the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) was established in 1959 the basic idea was to use comparative analysis of country differences in achievement to take advantage of the world as an educational laboratory. A large number of comparative studies involving substantial numbers of countries has since then been conducted and much has indeed been lear...

Comment The fall in differences in height between groups varying in intelligence and educational level is probably attributable to changing social factors,perhaps specifically a greater homogeneity of nutritional conditions across different social classes. In earlier data we found that the social class of parents correlated with the intelligence (0 32) and educational level (0 42) of their chil...

We evaluated age-related differences in the optimality of decision boundary settings in a diffusion model analysis. In the model, the width of the decision boundary represents the amount of evidence that must accumulate in favor of a response alternative before a decision is made. Wide boundaries lead to slow but accurate responding, and narrow boundaries lead to fast but inaccurate responding....

Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) were collected concurrently with stimulus presentation during a source monitoring task. Younger adults were less likely than older adults to make source monitoring errors and their ERP records showed far greater discrimination between target stimuli and familiar but nontarget foils. Older adults not only made more source errors but produced high amplitude late po...

In the article, presented are sufficient and necessary conditions for a class of functions involving the ratio of two gamma functions to be logarithmically completely monotonic. From this, some inequalities for bounding the ratio of two gamma functions are refined, extended and sharpened readily, and double inequalities on the divided differences of the psi and polygamma functions are derived s...

The distinction of between-person age differences from within-person age changes is necessary for understanding aging-related change processes. Although longitudinal studies are required to address issues relating to within person change, most studies begin using age-heterogeneous samples and conclude using survival-heterogeneous samples. Given the numerous potential confounds associated with a...

Using data from two surveys in three counties where the prevalence of uxorilocal marriage differs greatly, this paper analyzes the effects of marriage form, individual, family and social factors on age at first marriage and spousal age difference. The results show that, under the Chinese patrilineal joint family system, compared with the dominant virilocal marriage form, uxorilocal marriage sig...