Cultural Transmission in Education.

• Author: Figlio, David

In recent decades, economists have studied how beliefs and preferences are formed and updated, and how cultural and social norms affect economic decisions. (1) In a series of papers, together with our collaborators, we investigate how vertical and horizontal cultural transmission of preferences may affect educational outcomes.

Long-Term Orientation and Educational Outcomes

In our work with Umut Ozek, we study the relevance of one specific cultural value--long-term orientation, the ability to delay gratification and exert selfcontrol. (2) This trait has been associated with physical, emotional, and educational outcomes.

We consider the vertical transmission of this cultural value from parents to children and its effect on children's school performance. To isolate the importance of cultural values, we study first- and second-generation immigrants attending public schools in Florida, one of the states with the largest fraction of immigrants in the United States. Immigrants are almost ideal subjects for the study of vertical transmission because they face the same educational environment as the native born in Florida's schools but they bring with them the cultural attitudes of their countries of origin. We attribute to each student the long-term orientation of their country of origin by using a well-known cross-country measure. (3)

We also analyze a large administrative dataset from the Florida Departments of Education and Health containing information on educational outcomes of K-12 students who attended Florida public schools in 2002-03 and 2011-12. School records are merged with birth vital records, which allow for the identification of first- and second-generation immigrants and contain important family background information, such as maternal education.

Figure 1 presents the raw correlations between long-term orientation and one of the educational outcomes studied in the paper, standardized math scores.

We find that students who immigrate from countries that emphasize the importance of long-term orientation perform better than immigrants from countries where delayed gratification is not an important cultural value. We control for individual characteristics and school fixed effects. We find not only differences in levels, but also an improvement over time in standardized test scores in mathematics and reading for students from long-term oriented cultures. These students also have fewer absences and disciplinary incidents, they are less likely to repeat a grade, more likely to graduate from high school in four years, and more likely to take advancedlevel classes while in high school.

In comparison, Figure 2 plots the average standardized test scores in mathematics and reading by grade of White, US-born students and first-generation immigrants grouped by quartiles of long-term orientation. The performance over time of all the students, including the US-born, is ranked monotonically based on long-term orientation quartiles; the US measure of longterm orientation is 0.26, close to the bottom quartile of the immigrants' distribution. Also, while the performance of immigrants continues to increase as they progress in school, the performance of US-born students remains flat during their school careers. Our work emphasizes the role of parents in transmitting cultural values, but also the role of social learning in reinforcing those values. Parents from long-term oriented countries choose higher-rated schools and their children are more likely to join programs for gifted students, controlling for initial conditions. Being in a school with immigrants speaking the same language reinforces the effect of culture.

These results are confirmed with student-level data from a large set of countries using the Programme for International Student Assessment, suggesting that, independent of the school system and the country of destination, the relative performance of immigrants relates to the long-term orientation of the country of origin and it matters for educational outcomes.

Gender Role...