Effects of Parental Background on Other-regarding Preferences in Children

Michal Bauer, Julie Chytilová () and Barbara Pertold-Gębicka

CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague

Abstract: Other-regarding preferences are central for the ability to solve collective action problems and thus for society’s welfare. We study how the formation of other-regarding preferences during childhood is related to parental background. Using binary-choice dictator games to classify subjects into other-regarding types, we find that children of less educated parents are less altruistic and more spiteful. This link is robust to controlling for a range of child, family, and peer characteristics, and is attenuated for smarter children. The results suggest that less educated parents are either less efficient to instill social norms or their children less able to acquire them.

Keywords: other-regarding preferences; altruism; spite; experiments with children; family background; education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 D64 I24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cerge-ei.cz/pdf/wp/Wp450.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Effects of Parental Background on Other-Regarding Preferences in Children (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:cer:papers:wp450

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucie Vasiljevova ().