Ritchie & Bates, 2013; Sabates & Parsons, 2012; Von Stumm et al., 2013). Building on Sen’s capabilities approach, Heckman and Corbin (2016) highlight the role of early skills in shaping not only objective outcomes but also in enabling adults to flourish. Building on this, we focus on life satisfaction as an outcome variable, an important proxy for overall life quality. Life satisfaction, which has gained attention across disciplines such as economics, sociology, and psychology (e.g., Diener, 2000; Diener et al., 1985; Diener et al., 1999), represents a weighted average of satisfaction across life domains, varying in importance across individuals (Erdogan et al., 2012; Heller et al., 2004; Pavot & Diener, 2008). As a subjective measure, it reflects personal evaluations of life quality. Related to our work, a variety of papers analyze the relationship between early cognitive skills and well-being. Dodgeon et al. (2020) show that cognitive performance at age 7, measured by a latent variable constructed from four tests (including reading and arithmetic) relates to physical well-being and the quality of life at age 50 (proxied by control, autonomy, self-realization, and pleasure). Similarly, Von Stumm et al. (2013) show that eleven-year-olds’ cognitive ability, measured by a latent variable of verbal reasoning, arithmetic, and English tests, relates to adult physiological distress at ages 46-51. Layard et al. (2014) find a positive relationship between childhood intellectual performance at ages 5, 10, and 16 and life satisfaction at age 34. Fle`che et al. (2021) examine whether the relationship between childhood cognition and adult life satisfaction remains stable over time, showing that intellectual performance at ages 5, 10, and 16 is positively related to life satisfaction at ages 26, 30, 34, and 42. They use the British Ability Scales score at age 10, which aims at measuring general intellectual functioning. Unlike these studies, which analyze the predictions of cognitive 17
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