New paper accepted in Journal of Political Economy
The paper titled "When Parents Decide: Gender Differences in Competitiveness" by Jonas Tungodden and Alexander Willén has been accepted in Journal of Political Economy.
Abstract
Parents make important choices for their children in many areas of life, yet the empirical literature on this topic is scarce. We study parents’ competitiveness choices for their children by combining two large-scale artefactual field experiments with highquality longitudinal administrative data. We document three main sets of findings. First, parents choose more competition for their sons than daughters. Second, this gender difference can largely be explained by parents’ beliefs about their children’s competitiveness preferences. Third, parents’ choices predict children’s later-in-life educational outcomes. Taken together, these findings provide novel evidence on the role of parents in shaping children’s long-term outcomes.
Read full paper here.