Health Effects on Children's Willingness to Compete

Björn Bartling, Ernst Fehr and Daniel Schunk

No 2011-014, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: The formation of human capital is important for a society's welfare and economic success. Recent literature shows that child health can provide an important explanation for disparities in children's human capital development across different socio-economic groups. While this literature focuses on cognitive skills as determinants of human capital, it neglects non-cognitive skills. We analyze data from economic experiments with preschoolers and their mothers to investigate whether child health can explain developmental gaps in children's non-cognitive skills. Our measure for children's noncognitive skills is their willingness to compete with others. Our findings suggest that health problems are negatively related to children's willingness to compete and that the effect of health on competitiveness differs with socio-economic background. Health has a strongly negative effect in our sub-sample with low socioeconomic background, whereas there is no effect in our sub-sample with high socio-economic background.

Keywords: willingness to compete; non-cognitive skills; human capital; health; household survey studies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 I10 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-hrm
Note: IP
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Forthcoming in Experimental Economics

Downloads: (external link)
http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Bartli ... ffects-childrens.pdf First version, May 15, 2011 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Health effects on children’s willingness to compete (2012)
Working Paper: Health Effects on Children's Willingness to Compete (2011)
Working Paper: Health Effects on Children's Willingness to Compete (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hka:wpaper:2011-014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jennifer Pachon ().