explains the negative relationship. Possible, though speculative, explanations include that in situations where math skills are more beneficial for adult life satisfaction, stronger reading skills (relative to math) may not be advantageous and could even be detrimental. For instance, individuals excelling in reading but lagging in math may face careers or situations where their math weakness limits satisfaction. Another explanation could be a trade-off between developing reading and math skills early in life, where an imbalance may have long-term consequences. The other findings in Table A.22 are consistent with previous results, although the relationship between early math skills and adult life satisfaction becomes slightly stronger. 2.4.5 Robustness checks We perform several additional analyses to verify the stability and reliability of our main findings in the appendix. First, we address potential selective attrition in our longitudinal study. Attrition can occur due to factors such as participant fatigue, death, or life changes. Tables A.1 and A.2 in the appendix examine whether attrition relates to early reading and math skills, finding that individuals with better early proficiency are less likely to drop out. This aligns with Sullivan et al. (2023), who note that the age 46 sweep overrepresents individuals with an advantaged childhood socioeconomic background. We verify the robustness of our main results to attrition bias using inverse probability weighting, as shown in Table A.18. We find, however, that the relationship between early reading skills and life satisfaction at age 46 becomes insignificant, whereas it was significant at the 10% level in our main results. 35
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