Compensation vs. Reinforcement: Experimental Identification of Parental Aversion to Inequality in Offspring

Felipe Barrera-Osorio, Leonardo Bonilla-Mejía, Matias Busso, Sebastian Galiani, Hyunjae Kang, Juan Munoz-Morales and Juan Pantano

No 35375, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Parents may invest differently across children by compensating the disadvantaged child or by reinforcing the child with higher expected returns. We study this question using a conditional cash transfer experiment that uniquely randomized transfers at the student level, generating exogenous variation in transfer exposure across siblings within the same household. The transfers increased short-run attendance among treated students but generated negative spillovers on untreated siblings: untreated siblings of treated students were 3.7 percentage points less likely to graduate from college, a decline of about 30 percent relative to the control mean. We interpret these effects using a dynamic model of household schooling decisions that identifies parental aversion to inequality in children’s educational outcomes. The estimated model implies limited aversion to inequality in children’s educational outcomes and reproduces held-out treatment effects not used in estimation. A decomposition shows that the negative spillover is primarily driven by substitution in educational investments toward the treated child.

JEL-codes: D13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-06
Note: DEV
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35375.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
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:nbr:nberwo:35375

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35375
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().