Evidence suggests that books in the childhood home impact children’s educational and occupational attainments. Previous research finds this ‘book effect’ after conditioning on parental socio-economic status and national context. Human and cultural capital theories offer plausible explanations for this book effect. However, mechanisms underlying the book effect remain empirically illusory. Drawing on previous findings, the authors develop theoretical arguments that human and cultural capital are not the entire story behind the book effect. Designing a formal model of all these processes, the authors test their claims using immigration, language and country-context to adjudicate between mechanisms hypothesized by the theories. Using CILS4EU data in four countries and structural equation modeling to test these theories’ models against the data, the authors find the direct effect of books does not differ between native and immigrant adolescents in predicting 9th grade language aptitude scores. Moreover, this effect does not vary much by country. Reading habits and primary language spoken at home explain only part of the effect suggesting the presence of books measures something operating independently and in addition to human and cultural capital. The authors suggest books create opportunities for children whose parents are unlikely to cultivate scholarly values on average.

有证据表明，童年时代的家中的书籍会影响儿童的教育和职业素养。先前的研究是在对父母的社会经济地位和国家背景进行调节后发现的这种“书本效应”。人力和文化资本理论为这本书的效果提供了合理的解释。但是，根据经验，影响书本效应的机制仍然是虚幻的。根据先前的发现，作者提出了理论上的论点，即人力和文化资本并不是本书效应背后的全部故事。设计了所有这些过程的正式模型后，作者使用移民，语言和国家/地区背景来检验他们的主张，以在理论所假设的机制之间进行裁定。使用四个国家/地区的CILS4EU数据和结构方程模型来针对这些数据测试这些理论的模型，作者发现，在预测9年级语言能力得分方面，本地青少年和移民青少年的直接影响没有区别。而且，这种影响因国家/地区而变化不大。阅读习惯和在家说的主要语言只能部分解释这种影响，表明书本的存在可以衡量一些独立运作的，人力和文化资本之外的东西。作者建议书为父母不太可能平均培养学术价值观的孩子创造机会。阅读习惯和在家说的主要语言只能部分解释这种影响，表明书本的存在可以衡量一些独立运作的，人力和文化资本之外的东西。作者建议书为父母不太可能平均培养学术价值观的孩子创造机会。阅读习惯和在家说的主要语言只能部分解释这种影响，表明书本的存在可以衡量一些独立运作的，人力和文化资本之外的东西。作者建议书为父母不太可能平均培养学术价值观的孩子创造机会。