Pia Pinger

Human Capital Development and Equality of Opportunity

Pia Pinger's research focuses on the unequal formation of skills, health and economic preferences across individuals. Several of her projects rely on contextual variation, childhood interventions or structural econometric models to understand how resources among income-constrained families shape human capital within and across generations. In recent work, for example, she documents large differences in prosociality, risk-taking, patience, altruism and IQ between children from high and low socio-economic status backgrounds. Using structural empirical models, she and her co-authors then show that disparities in the level of parental investments hold substantial importance regarding the socio-economic status gaps in economic preferences and, to a lesser extent, IQ.

Aside from the direct effect of household resources, children's human capital formation crucially depends on educational decisions of parents and adolescent children. In particular, during critical educational transitions, i.e. when children switch from primary to secondary school or from secondary school to tertiary education, a child's environment can be decisive for education and labour market outcomes. In current work, Pia Pinger shows that school choice strongly depends on a child's parental background and that educational opportunities in Germany are distributed very unequally. Her work also demonstrates that family income shocks can have substantial implications for educational trajectories and that part of the effect is mediated through beliefs and aspirations. Childhood interventions, for instance in the form of mentoring shortly before an important educational decision, can remediate some of the existing inequality of opportunity.

Pia Pinger is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Bonn, IZA Research Fellow, and closely affiliated with the newly founded Institute on Behavior and Inequality (briq). She studied at Maastricht University and Sciences Po Paris and has received her PhD from the University of Mannheim in 2013.