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Among the extraordinary shocks to household life caused by the Covid-19 pandemic was the sudden shift to distance learning in K-12 schools. Gone were Monday through Friday routines of school day, extracurricular activities, and evening homework; schools scrambled to launch alternative delivery systems, expecting parents to step in and spend significant amounts of time helping children continue to learn. This study examines the sudden shift to distance learning using data from U.S. Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey. Conducted weekly from April through July 2020, the survey tracked COVID-related shocks to employment, health, food and housing security, and education in the U.S. population. We use Pulse data on 200,000 households with K-12 children to examine how school systems shifted, how parents stepped up and spent time helping children learn, how parental time inputs varied with parent education, and how education changes intersected with other pandemic shocks, including job loss and food insecurity. We find that parents and children spent significantly more time in learning activities when their schools provided diversified educational inputs, especially live contact time with teachers; live contact hours also facilitated children learning on their own. Given the type of alternative schooling, less educated parents spent no less time helping children than better educated parents, although they faced significantly more problems with computer and internet access. Thus, parents generally tried to help children continue learning in the pandemic, albeit with potentially wide variation in the resources they could supply to mitigate the drop in learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite research showing labor-market returns to non-cognitive skills, we lack research on how teachers’ noncognitive skills relate to other available measures of teacher quality and student outcomes because datasets typically do not contain explicit measures of these skills. We overcome this limitation by validating several performance-task measures of teacher conscientiousness based upon the effort that teachers exert while completing a survey. We conduct our analysis using the Measures of Effective Teaching Longitudinal Database where teachers were randomly assigned to their classrooms in the second year of the study. We overcome issues of non-compliance by exploiting the random assignment in an instrumental variables approach to estimate the causal impacts of teachers on their students’ outcomes during the second year of the MET project. We find suggestive evidence that measures of teacher survey effort capture important dimensions of teacher quality. These measures present small but significant correlations with classroom-observation measures and principal ratings of teacher quality and are predictive of student cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes. Moreover, survey-effort measures capture teacher effects on students that are not necessarily captured by other available measures of teacher quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The productive and allocative theories predict that education has positive impact on health: the more educated adopt healthier life styles and use more efficiently health inputs, and this explains why they live longer. We find partial support for these theories with an econometric analysis on a large sample of Europeans aged above 50 documenting a significant and positive correlation among education years, life styles, health outputs and functionalities. We however find confirmation for an anomaly already observed in the United States, namely the more educated are more likely to contract cancer. Our results are robust when controlling for endogeneity and reverse causality in IV estimates with instrumental variables related to quarter of birth and neighbours' cultural norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Character traits and noncognitive skills are important for human capital development and long-run life outcomes. Research in economics and psychology now shows this convincingly. But research into the exact determinants of noncognitive skills has been slowed by a common data limitation: most large-scale datasets do not contain adequate measures of noncognitive skills. This is particularly problematic in education policy evaluation. We demonstrate that within any survey dataset, there is important latent information that can be used as a proxy measure of noncognitive skills. Specifically, we examine the amount of conscientious effort that students exhibit on surveys, as measured by their item response rates. We use six nationally-representative, longitudinal surveys of American youth. We find that the percentage of questions skipped during the baseline year when respondents were adolescents is a significant predictor of later-life educational attainment, net of cognitive ability. Insofar as item response rates affect employment and income, they do so through their effect on educational attainment. The pattern of findings gives compelling reasons to view item response rates as a promising behavioral measure of noncognitive skills for use in future research. We posit that response rates are a measure of conscientiousness, though additional research is required to determine what exact noncognitive skills are being captured by item response rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]