Leadership delegation in rotten kid families

Joao Faria and Emilson Silva

Journal of Population Economics, 2020, vol. 33, issue 2, No 3, 460 pages

Abstract: Abstract In a family context with endogenous timing, multiple public goods, and alternative parental instruments, we show that the optimality of authority (leadership) delegation for the sequential-action game played by rotten kids and a parent depends crucially on the degree of heterogeneity in the kids’ preferences. For homogeneous kids, the rotten kid theorem—the situation in which rotten kids find it desirable to internalize all externalities that arise in the family setting—holds irrespective of the parental policy instrument, implying that it is optimal to delegate leadership to the kids. If the kids are heterogeneous, however, parental leadership yields a first best outcome if the kids are economically dependent and agree on the tradeoff between public goods. For economically independent kids, parental leadership is optimal if the degree of heterogeneity is sufficiently high. These findings provide us with empirically testable hypotheses and contribute to the debate regarding the social desirability of the ‘authoritative parenting style’.

Keywords: Rotten kids; Public goods; Endogenous timing; Heterogeneous preferences; Economically dependent; D13; D61; D64; D78; H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00148-019-00755-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:jopoec:v:33:y:2020:i:2:d:10.1007_s00148-019-00755-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... tion/journal/148/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00148-019-00755-4

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Population Economics is currently edited by K.F. Zimmermann

More articles in Journal of Population Economics from Springer, European Society for Population Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().