Parenting with Patience: Parental Incentives and Child Development

Daniela Del Boca, Christopher Flinn, Ewout Verriest and Matthew Wiswall

Journal of Political Economy, 2026, vol. 134, issue 1, 210 - 284

Abstract: We construct a dynamic model of child development where forward-looking parents and children jointly take actions to increase the child’s cognitive and noncognitive skills within a Markov perfect equilibrium framework. In addition to time and money investments in their child, parents also choose whether to use explicit incentives to increase the child’s self-investment, which may reduce the child’s future intrinsic motivation to invest by reducing the child’s discount factor. We use the estimated model parameters to show that the use of extrinsic motivation has large costs in terms of the child’s future incentives to invest in themselves.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/738481 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/738481 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:jpolec:doi:10.1086/738481

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Political Economy from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().