Predicting mid-life capital formation with pre-school delay of gratification and life-course measures of self-regulation

Dan Benjamin (), David Laibson, Walter Mischel, Philip K. Peake, Yuichi Shoda, Alexandra Steiny Wellsjo () and Nicole L. Wilson
Additional contact information
Dan Benjamin: University of Southern California and NBER
Walter Mischel: Columbia University
Philip K. Peake: Smith College
Yuichi Shoda: University of Washington
Alexandra Steiny Wellsjo: University of California at Berkeley
Nicole L. Wilson: University of Oregon

No GRU_2019_030, GRU Working Paper Series from City University of Hong Kong, Department of Economics and Finance, Global Research Unit

Abstract: How well do pre-school delay of gratification and life-course measures of self-regulation predict mid-life capital formation? We surveyed 113 participants of the 1967–1973 Bing pre-school studies on delay of gratification when they were in their late 40’s. They re- ported 11 mid-life capital formation outcomes, including net worth, permanent income, absence of high-interest debt, forward-looking behaviors, and educational attainment. To address multiple hypothesis testing and our small sample, we pre-registered an analysis plan of well–powered tests. As predicted, a newly constructed and pre-registered mea- sure derived from preschool delay of gratification does not predict the 11 capital formation variables (i.e., the sign-adjusted average correlation was 0.02). A pre-registered composite self-regulation index, combining preschool delay of gratification with survey measures of self-regulation collected at ages 17, 27, and 37, does predict 10 of the 11 capital formation variables in the expected direction, with an average correlation of 0.19. The inclusion of the preschool delay of gratification measure in this composite index does not affect the index’s predictive power. We tested several hypothesized reasons that preschool delay of gratification does not have predictive power for our mid-life capital formation variables.

Keywords: Self-regulation; Delay of gratification; Mid-life capital formation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 D91 I12 I21 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 14 pages
Date: 2019-11-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, available online 4 Nov 2019.

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cb.cityu.edu.hk/ef/doc/GRU/WPS/GRU%232019-030%20Benjamin.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Predicting mid-life capital formation with pre-school delay of gratification and life-course measures of self-regulation (2020)
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:cth:wpaper:gru_2019_030

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GRU Working Paper Series from City University of Hong Kong, Department of Economics and Finance, Global Research Unit Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by GRU ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).