Parents, Schools and Human Capital Differences across Countries

Results from international standardized tests show large cross-country differences in students' performances. Where do these gaps in human capital achievement come from? This paper argues that differences in cultural environments and parental inputs may be of great importance. We compare the school performance of second generation immigrants from different nationalities but educated in the same school, and find that those coming from high-scoring countries in the PISA test do better than their peers. The gap is larger among students whose parents have recently immigrated and have little education, suggesting that the importance of country-specific cultural traits declines as parents integrate in their host countries. We quantify the overall contribution of various parental inputs to the observed cross-country differences in the PISA test performance, and show that they account for about 40% of the gap between East Asia and other regions. This pattern questions whether PISA scores and other measures of human capital achievement should be interpreted only as quality proxies for a country's educational system. They actually reflect an important intergenerational and cultural component.