Not Playing Favorites: An Experiment on Parental Fairness Preferences

James Berry, Rebecca Dizon-Ross and Maulik Jagnani

No 26732, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

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)
Date: 2020-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-lab
Note: CH DEV ED
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26732.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Not Playing Favorites: An Experiment on Parental Fairness Preferences (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:nbr:nberwo:26732

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26732

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().