Risk Preferences of Children and Adolescents in Relation to Gender, Cognitive Skills, Soft Skills, and Executive Functions
James Andreoni,
Amalia Di Girolamo,
John List,
Claire Mackevicius and
Anya Samek
Artefactual Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website
Abstract:
We conduct experiments eliciting risk preferences with over 1,400 children and adolescents aged 3-15 years old. We complement our data with an assessment of cognitive and executive function skills. First, we find that adolescent girls display significantly greater risk aversion than adolescent boys. This pattern is not observed among young children, suggesting that the risk gap in risk preferences emerges in early adolescence. Second, we find that at all ages in our study, cognitive skills (specifically math ability) are positively associated with risk taking. Executive functions among children, and soft skills among adolescents, are negatively associated with risk taking. Third, we find that greater risk-tolerance is associated with higher likelihood of disciplinary referrals, which provides evidence that our task is equipped to measure a relevant behavioral outcome. For academics, our research provides a deeper understanding of the developmental origins of risk preferences and highlights the important role of cognitive and executive function skills to better understand the association between risk preferences and cognitive abilities over the studied age range.
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-ltv, nep-neu, nep-rmg and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)
Downloads: (external link)
http://s3.amazonaws.com/fieldexperiments-papers2/papers/00668.pdf
Related works:
Journal Article: Risk preferences of children and adolescents in relation to gender, cognitive skills, soft skills, and executive functions (2020) 
Working Paper: Risk Preferences of Children and Adolescents in Relation to Gender, Cognitive Skills, Soft Skills, and Executive Functions (2019) 
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:feb:artefa:00668
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Artefactual Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Francesca Pagnotta ().