Not Playing Favorites: An Experiment on Parental Fairness Preferences / James Berry, Rebecca Dizon-Ross, Maulik Jagnani.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Berry, James.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Dizon-Ross, Rebecca.

Jagnani, Maulik.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w26732.

NBER working paper series no. w26732

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Not Playing Favorites

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.

Summary:

We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment to identify parents' preferences for investing in their children. The experiment exogenously varied the short-run returns to educational investments to identify how much parents care about maximizing total household earnings, minimizing cross-sibling inequality in "outcomes" (child-level earnings), and minimizing cross-sibling inequality in "inputs" (child-level investments). We show that while parents place some weight on maximizing earnings, they also display a strong preference for equality in inputs, forgoing roughly 40% of their potential earnings or 90% of a day's wage to equalize inputs. We find no evidence that parents care about equalizing outcomes.

Notes:

Print version record

February 2020.