Chapter 2. Early Skills and Adult Life Satisfaction We use longitudinal data from the 1970 British Cohort Study, which follows all English, Scottish, and Welsh people born in the same week in April 1970. Information is collected on a wide variety of topics, including education, health, and social development. The longitudinal aspect of the dataset provides invaluable input for studies that aim to analyze aspects at different life stages. We use data from ages 10 to 46, and perform separate analyses for early reading and math proficiency to inspect differences between these skills. Importantly, we are able to control for a measure of general intelligence, which is arguably an important potential confounder of our predictions. Our main results indicate that the relationship between early reading and math skills and adult life satisfaction is significantly positive. For reading skills, the size of the relationship decreases over the life course. For math skills, this relationship is remarkably stable across adulthood. An increase of 1 SD in early math skills is associated with an increase of around 0.07-0.10 SD in adult life satisfaction. This is a strong relationship. It is roughly equal to the size of the relationship between take-home income and life satisfaction at age 46. Income and daily functioning partially mediate these relationships. When inspecting domain-specific satisfaction, we find that early reading and math skills predict general health satisfaction, financial management, and emotional satisfaction in adulthood. These relationships remain significant during adulthood. A large body of literature explores the relationship between early skills and objective outcomes in adulthood, such as labor market performance and health (e.g., Crawford & Cribb, 2013; Fischbach et al., 2013; Hanushek et al., 2015; Hatch et al., 2007; McIntosh & Vignoles, 2001; 16
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