884 vIII. EMERGING  ISSuES AND  NEW  DIRECTIONS
White achievement gap. Also see Cunha and Heck -
man (2008a).
74. We draw on the analysis of Heckman, Pinto, 
and Savelyev (2013).
75. Sylva (1997) describes the Perry program as 
a Vygotskian program fostering personality skills. 
Vygotsky developed a psychology of child develop -
ment in structured social settings that emphasized 
development of social and personality skills.
76. See DeLong and Magin (2009).
77. See Bierman et al. (2010).
78. Note, however, that the largest federal study 
to date on character education programs, including 
PATHS, failed to find evidence for improvements 
in behavior or academic performance (see Social 
and Character Development Research Consortium, 
2010).
79. However, a more recent large-scale study 
(Farran, Lipsey, & Wilson, 2011) does not find any 
effect of the program on self-  regulation or literacy, 
language, and mathematics achievement.
80. They estimated the effect of schooling on 
self- esteem and locus of control, personality skills 
related to neuroticism. The Rosenberg Self-  Esteem 
Scale attempts to assess the degree of approval or 
disapproval of oneself (Rosenberg, 1965). The re -
lationship between these measures and the Big Five 
skills of neuroticism is discussed in Almlund et al. 
(2011).
81. Both Heckman, Humphries, and Veramendi 
(2018) and Heckman et al. (2006) used an identi -
fication strategy based on matching on proxies for 
unobserved skills that correct for measurement 
error and the endogeneity of schooling.
82. There is preliminary evidence that the per -
sonality of one’s peers may also have an impact on 
one’s outcomes. Golsteyn and Schildberg-  Hörisch 
(2017) exploited random variation in assignment of 
students to university tutorial sections to estimate 
a positive effect on performance from having more 
persistent and more risk averse peers. This effect is 
limited to students who themselves have a low de -
gree of persistence and is twice as large in magni -
tude as that of having peers with higher GPAs. As 
the hours spent studying are unaffected, the authors 
concluded that the presence of persistent and risk- 
averse peers directly enhances the productivity of 
low- persistence students in their company.
83. In the language of economics, the elasticity 
of substitution for cognitive inputs is smaller later 
in life.
84. Elasticities of substitution are essentially the 
same at different stages of the life cycle.
85. See Todd and Zhang (2019) and Terraccia -
no, McCrae, and Costa (2010).
86. Cunha et al. (2006) reported that 16% of the 
variation in educational attainment is explained by 
adolescent cognitive skills, 12% is due to adolescent 
personality (socioemotional skills), and 15% is due 
to measured parental investments.87. The relationship between locus of control 
and the Big Five trait of neuroticism is discussed in 
Almlund et al. (2011).
88. However, it is unclear what part of these 
changes can be attributed to changes in risk prefer -
ences as opposed to altered beliefs about returns to 
investing.
89. As discussed earlier, recent research suggests 
that they may be strongly related to noncognitive 
personality skills traditionally measured by psy -
chologists.
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