(No) Trade-off between numeracy and verbal reasoning development: PISA evidence from Italy's academic tracking

The study uses PISA data to evaluate cognitive development trade-offs between numeracy and literacy skills. The compendious literature validating the educational and financial gains from technical education fails to address the potential underdevelopment of verbal skills. Exploiting academic tracking in Italy's high school education with distinctive Liberal Arts (n = 841) and STEM (n = 1968) pathways, the study rules out any cognitive trade-off and estimates the STEM premium on the reading section at about one-fifth of an international standard deviation (20 PISA points). Decomposition of the education production function reveals that the technical track outperforms Liberal Arts due to greater educational production efficiency overcompensating for worse educational production inputs. Further regression analysis links the STEM advantage to the four additional instructional units in math and physics. Robustness checks conducted using TIMSS and PIRLS test scores exclude that effects are secondary to differences in preexisting levels of student skills.1