Do Economic Preferences of Children Predict Behavior?

Laura Breitkopf, Shyamal Chowdhury, Shambhavi Priyam, Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch and Matthias Sutter

No 10988, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We use novel data on nearly 6,000 children and adolescents aged 6 to 16 that combine incen-tivized measures of social, time, and risk preferences with rich information on child behavior and family environment to study whether children’s economic preferences predict their behavior. Re-sults from standard regression specifications demonstrate the predictive power of children’s pref-erences for their prosociality, educational achievement, risky behaviors, emotional health, and behavioral problems. In a second step, we add information on a family’s socio-economic status, family structure, religion, parental preferences and IQ, and parenting style to capture household environment. As a result, the predictive power of preferences for behavior attenuates. We discuss implications of our findings for research on the formation of children’s preferences and behavior.

Keywords: social preferences; time preferences; risk preferences; experiments with children; origins of preferences; human capital; behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-hea, nep-inv and nep-ltv
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Related works:
Working Paper: Do Economic Preferences of Children Predict Behavior? (2024)
Working Paper: Do economic preferences of children predict behavior? (2024)
Working Paper: Do economic preferences of children predict behavior? (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10988

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