Following the child development literature (Heckman and Kautz 2013), we term scores from these tests as "pre-school cognitive skills" and use "pre-school cognitive skills", "initial academic skills", and "initial cognitive endowment" alternatively in this study.
To facilitate an interpretation of the results, variables contributing to the academic achievement of students are separated into four groups: (1) their characteristics, (2) their families' characteristics, (3) their initial cognitive skill endowments, and (4) other factors.
The aggregate decomposition results (either at means or along the distribution) additionally suggest a decreasing role of the characteristic effect in contributing to the total gap as students advance to higher grades.19 This is consistent with the declining contribution of initial cognitive skill endowments to the total characteristic effect as students progress through school.20.20
However, significant gender differences in terms of initial cognitive and health endowments are noticed.
While the value-added estimates are the focus of this analysis, Fig. 1 also reports gender test score gap estimates (the thick dotted brown line) for comparison purposes and their corresponding 95% confidence intervals (the thin dotted brown line) obtained using regression model 2, which does not include initial endowment in cognitive skills.
It is patrimony of all living agents, casually or intentionally activated in certain situations, challenging the old conception of creativity as exceptional endowment of talented cognitive agents (Bink and Marsh 2000; Ward et al. 1997; Weisberg 1993).
Solely the differences in the average of the components of human capital endowment (education, experience and cognitive ability) explain the wage gap in the formal sector.
Subsequently, Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition results show that in both formal and informal sectors, the rural urban wage differential is explained by differences in levels of human capital endowment; education, experience and cognitive ability.
This contrasts with the upward bias for schooling, suggesting that the underlying physical and job-related components of genetic endowments are negatively correlated with those for cognitive skills. .
Our cognitive capacities and faculties are part of the natural endowment we owe to biological evolution.
