Not Playing Favorites: An Experiment on Parental Fairness Preferences

James Berry, Rebecca Dizon-Ross () and Maulik Jagnani ()
Additional contact information
Rebecca Dizon-Ross: University of Chicago
Maulik Jagnani: Yale University - Economic Growth Center

No 2020-06, Working Papers from Becker Friedman Institute for Research In Economics

Abstract: 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.

JEL-codes: I20 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65 pages
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-lab and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

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https://repec.bfi.uchicago.edu/RePEc/pdfs/BFI_WP_202006.pdf (application/pdf)

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Working Paper: Not Playing Favorites: An Experiment on Parental Fairness Preferences (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bfi:wpaper:2020-06

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