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Exploring socioeconomic-related inequality in children’s cognitive achievement in Peru

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Abstract

This paper applies the concentration index to estimate socioeconomic-related inequality in language skills among children aged 5 to 15, using longitudinal data from Peru. We find the existence of socioeconomic-related inequality in language skills, starting from an early age and showing little change until adolescence, albeit dropping. The cognitive achievement regression estimates highlight the significant role of family socioeconomic status (SES) on children’s language performance. Our decomposition analysis strengthens this result, indicating parental SES as the major contributor to socioeconomic-related inequality in language skills, even after accounting for the lagged test scores. We further decompose the source of changes in socioeconomic-related inequality in language skills between ages 5 and 15, and show changes in household wealth inequality and the associated elasticity both contribute to changes in socioeconomic-related inequalities in language performance.

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Acknowledgements

This research is funded by National Funds of the FCT - Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology within the project https://doi.org/10.54499/UIDB/03182/2020 and https://doi.org/10.54499/UIDB/05749/2020.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Minho, Campus de Gualtar, 4710-057, Braga, Portugal

    Emmanuel Ngoy

  2. Department of Economics and NIPE, University of Minho, Campus de Gualtar, 4710-057, Braga, Portugal

    Carla Sá

  3. CIPES, Braga, Portugal

    Carla Sá

  4. Department of Economics and JusGov, University of Minho, Campus de Gualtar, 4710-057, Braga, Portugal

    Paula Veiga

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  1. Emmanuel Ngoy
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  3. Paula Veiga
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Correspondence to Emmanuel Ngoy.

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The authors have no conflict of interest to declare. Young Lives, the dataset used in this study, is publicly available and can be downloaded upon registration at https://beta.ukdataservice.ac.uk/datacatalogue/series/series?id=2000060

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Ngoy, E., Sá, C. & Veiga, P. Exploring socioeconomic-related inequality in children’s cognitive achievement in Peru. J Econ Inequal (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-023-09615-4

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