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You are invited to the Business School external seminar hosted by the Economics department on Wednesday 20 January 2027 from 15:00 to 16:15 (1 hour talk and 15 minutes Q&A).

The seminar will be held in hybrid format: in Edward Wright S86 andon Teams.

The speaker is Dr Irina Merkurieva, Lecturer in Economics at University of St Andrews. Dr Merkurieva is a labour economist with research interests in the areas of retirement, informal employment, and executive compensation.

Title:

Childhood Aspirations and Adult Outcomes

Abstract

“This paper extracts aspirations from texts written in childhood by members of a British longitudinal cohort, and explores how these relate to later life outcomes. Applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to short essays collected at age 11, we identify four aspiration themes: family, hobbies, financial success, and career. The weight of these four themes varies substantially across respondents, with girls on average placing more weight on family, and boys on financial success. Aspirations extracted using our method are strongly predictive of later life outcomes, even when controlling for detailed measures of early life environment, ability, and family background. These associations are highly heterogenous by gender; for example, family-related aspirations are associated with higher educational attainment for men, but lower educational attainment for women.”

All are welcome.