Re-examining the relationship between patience, risk-taking, and human capital investment across countries*

Abstract

Hanushek et al. (2022) show that students in countries in which people are more patient and less risk-taking perform better in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test. In this paper, we probe the robustness of this study. Our narrow replication shows that most of the results are robust to alternative model specifications. Our broad replication shows that the main results are robust to measuring student performance with data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) instead of PISA.