27% for OBC students – both SCST and OBC students fare worse than the upper caste students along several dimensions of economic behaviour and personality traits. This lower selfevaluation can have important implications for their academic and labour market success. Our results reveal the depth of cumulative effects of years of discrimination along caste lines. Students in the lower caste groups not only express lower willingness to compete and less confidence, but they score lower on grittiness – the ability to pursue long-term goals with sustained effort – locus of control – the belief that life events are more under their control than determined by luck and other factors – conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and openness to experience. These outcomes have meaningful implications. For instance, competitiveness can explain gender gaps in academic track choice, job entry decisions, and wages; and those with an internal locus of control perceive the subjective returns on effort and investment to be higher – explaining the positive relationship between locus of control and investments in education, job search, and health behaviours. Given the importance of such traits such in explaining labour market performance, the wage and occupational disadvantage faced by SCSTs could be magnified due to lower ratings. SEEKING SOLUTIONSS Our results show that SCSTs and OBCs are at a disadvantage when it comes to behavioural preferences and ratings on personality traits, and they continue to suffer from historical and cultural discrimination. Children from minority groups are deprived not just because of their poorer socioeconomic status, but also because they grow up in environments characterised by low parental capital and a lack of social support. Our results show that a higher socioeconomic has some compensatory effects for low castes, but only for a small subset of personality traits. Likewise, attending a private school before joining university has some compensatory effect on certain personality traits. SCSTs who attended private school are more emotionally stable and agreeable than those who did not, while privately schooled OBCs are more conscientious and open to experience. The results suggest that access to better environments in private schools could potentially foster a healthier development of some personality traits among low caste groups. But parental investment in education is not enough. A very large improvement in wealth status would be needed to overcome some of the negative selfperceptions lower caste members have. Instead, there needs to be an urgent redesign of affirmative action policies, focused at a younger age, to mitigate the long-term consequences we observe of being born into a lowercaste family. Given that racial gaps in cognitive and socioemotional skills emerge even before children reach school-going age, and tend to persist thereafter, there is a compelling case for targeting early childhood interventions for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. It is important to follow these investments in later ages to reap the benefits. Currently, the earliest members of low castes can benefit from affirmative action is when they enter higher education or public sector employment, by which point it may be too late. There is an urgent need to invest in programmes that directly target the development of soft skills during childhood and adolescence. Beyond this policy action, there is the need to foster greater inter-caste contact to help reduce biases and negative stereotypes which have repercussions for self-confidence and self-esteem among low castes. Improvements have been made in recent decades, and there is evidence of significant catch-up experienced by SCSTs in terms of occupation, wages, consumption, and education. But more must be done to eliminate lingering prejudice and discrimination, and to assist lower caste children in their development to give them a greater chance of educational and employment success later in life. FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 35 Dr Saurabh Singhal is is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics, with a research interest in the political economy of development, human capital development issues and experimental economics. This article is based on the IZA Institute of Labour Economics discussion paper Social Identity, Behaviour, and Personality: Evidence from India, by Associate Professor Utteeyo Dasgupta and Associate Professor Subha Mani, of Fordham University; Dr Smriti Sharma, of Newcastle University Business School; and Dr Saurabh Singhal, of Lancaster University Management School. s.singhal1@lancaster.ac.uk
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