Detecting Drivers of Behavior at an Early Age: Evidence from a Longitudinal Field Experiment
Marco Castillo (marco.castillo@tamu.edu),
John List,
Ragan Petrie and
Anya Samek
No 28288, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Abstract:
We use field experiments with nearly 900 children to investigate how skills developed at ages 3-5 drive later-life outcomes. We find that skills map onto three distinct factors - cognitive skills, executive functions, and economic preferences. Returning to the children up to 7 years later, we find that executive functions, but not cognitive skills, predict the likelihood of receiving disciplinary referrals. Economic preferences have an independent effect: children who displayed impatience at ages 3-5 were more likely to receive disciplinary referrals. Random assignment to a parenting program reduced disciplinary referrals. This effect was not mediated by skills or preferences.
JEL-codes: C91 C93 D12 D81 I21 I26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-ltv and nep-neu
Note: CH ED
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28288.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Detecting Drivers of Behavior at an Early Age: Evidence from a Longitudinal Field Experiment (2024) 
Working Paper: Detecting Drivers of Behavior at an Early Age: Evidence from a Longitudinal Field Experiment (2021) 
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:28288
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28288
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 (wpc@nber.org).