On the sources of the black–white test score gap in Europe ☆ Eleonora Patacchini a , Yves Zenou b,c, ⁎ a Università di Roma, “La Sapienza”-Piazzale Aldo Moro, 5-00185 Roma, Italy b Department of Economics, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden c Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), Sweden abstract article info Article history: Received 18 December 2007 Received in revised form 14 November 2008 Accepted 18 November 2008 Available online 24 November 2008 Keywords: Ethnic minorities Education Parental involvement Oaxaca decomposition JEL classification: I21 J15 Z10 Differences between black and white students in Britain are investigated. If black parents would invest in education as much as white parents do, the racial test score gap in mathematics and reading would be reduced by 7 and 9%. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction While studies on racial gaps in outcomes are pervasive in the United States (see, Neal, 2006 for a review), relatively few are conducted elsewhere. In recent years, Europe has acquired the features of a multicultural and multiethnic society. Yet, empirical analyses of racial differences in socio-economic behavior in Europe are still quite limited. This dearth of research is partly motivated by the scarcity of data on these topics. The few (and recent) existing works on the racial gap in school achievements are snapshots on a sample of students (see, e.g. Bradley and Taylor, 2004; Gillborn and Mirza, 2000; Modood, 2005) documenting some sets of correlations. A notable exception is Wilson et al. (2005) where the focus is on the evolution in test scores between different ethnic groups and whites in England. Using the information on personal and school characteristics contained in a universe dataset of state school students in England, they investigate the roles of poverty, language, school quality and teacher influence on education. They find that none of these factors fully explains the empirical evidence. Their conclusions point to the fact that other forces like ethnic differences in attitudes, for which they have no measure, should be at work. This paper aims precisely at uncovering the importance of these factors in shaping the racial gap in Britain, focussing in particular on the role of parental involvement in the child's education. We exploit the unique characteristics of the National Child Development Study, which is a longitudinal survey containing very detailed information on cohort's members residential neighborhood, family environment and background, parental behavior, attitudes, school and education. The richness of this information provides us with a set of “non standard” variables to account for the heterogeneity of our sample and the dataset longitudinal feature allows us to tackle endogeneity issues. We document the existence of strong parenting differences between races and we find that a non-negligible part of the test score racial gap can be explained by parental involvement in a child's education. Parental interest, however, can proxy for a broad set of environ- mental and behavioral factors. Our findings have thus to be interpreted as suggestive evidence indicating that racial differences in behavioral factors, which are usually unobserved, might be responsible for at least a part of the racial differences in academic performance. The extent of the effects might be large. 2. Data Our empirical analysis is based on data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS). It is a longitudinal survey that follows all British persons who were born between the 3rd and 9th of March 1958, with follow-up surveys in 1965 at age 7 (NCDS sweep one), in Economics Letters 102 (2009) 49–52 ☆ We are grateful to an anonymous referee, Raquel Fernandez and the participants of the conference on “The Economics of Diversity, Migration, and Culture” in Bologna, September 2006, for very helpful comments and suggestions. ⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +46 8162880; fax: +4616159482. E-mail address: yves.zenou@ne.su.se (Y. Zenou). 0165-1765/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.econlet.2008.11.010 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Economics Letters journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/econbase