Patience among children

Recent policy initiatives offer cash payments to children (and often their families) to induce better health and educational choices. These policies implicitly assume that children are especially impatient (i.e., have high discount rates); however, little is known about the nature of children's patience, how it varies across children, and whether children can even make rational inter-temporal choices. This paper examines the inter-temporal choices of 5- to 16-year-old children in an artefactual field experiment. We examine their choices between varying levels of compensation received in 2 or 4 months in the future and in 0 or 2 months in the future. We find that children's choices are consistent with hyperbolic discounting, boys are less patient than girls, older children are more patient and that mathematical achievement test scores, private schooling and parent's patience are not correlated with children's patience. We also find that although more than 25% of children do not make rational inter-temporal choices within a single two-period time frame, we cannot find variables that explain this behavior other than age and standardized mathematical achievement test scores.     

Gender diversity,cash holdings and the role of the institutional environment: empirical evidence in Europe

While substantial evidence is emerging internationally on higher risk aversion among women than among men, there is less evidence on women’s business choices. We explore some of the reasons for the relationship between gender diversity and cash holdings. Specifically, this paper focuses on the choices involving the stock of cash held by firms in which women have executive roles and can consequently exert a crucial influence on the firms themselves. We estimate our proposed empirical models using a dataset of 12,466 observations from 18 European countries. We find a positive relationship between the presence of women with executive roles in the firm and cash holdings. Women tend to make more conservative choices probably because they are more risk averse than men are. This propensity has a relevant impact on the financial choices of firms when women play a leading role. Notably, the study demonstrates that the institutional environment and industry differences moderate our baseline relationship.     

Trust and gender: An examination of behavior and beliefs in the Investment Game

How does gender influence trust, the likelihood of being trusted and the level of trustworthiness? We compare choices by men and women in the Investment Game and use questionnaire data to try to understand the motivations for the behavioral differences. We find that men trust more than women, and women are more trustworthy than men. The relationship between expected return and trusting behavior is stronger among men than women, suggesting that men view the interaction more strategically than women. Women felt more obligated both to trust and reciprocate, but the impact of obligation on behavior varies.     

Preference for Risk in Investing as a Function of Trait Optimism and Gender

This research examines the role of gender and optimism on the riskiness of investment choices of students (N = 66) in a semester long investment contest with both monetary and academic incentives. Data suggest that males make more risky investment choices than females, and that this difference was primarily due to the riskier choices of optimistic males. In addition, males demonstrated greater variability in final portfolio value than did females. Our results suggest that 1) the well documented gender difference in investment strategies of men and women may be due to a specific subgroup of males (i.e., optimists); 2) that optimism may lead to different behavioral tendencies in men and women depending on the domain; and 3) that the benefits of optimism may be restricted to domains in which continued effort and information seeking are likely to lead to desired outcomes.     

Outrunning the gender gap—boys and girls compete equally

Recent studies find that women are less competitive than men. This gender difference in competitiveness has been suggested as one possible explanation for why men occupy the majority of top positions in many sectors. In this study we explore competitiveness in children, with the premise that both context and gendered stereotypes regarding the task at hand may influence competitive behavior. A related field experiment on Israeli children shows that only boys react to competition by running faster when competing in a race. We here test if there is a gender gap in running among 7–10 year old Swedish children. We also introduce two female sports, skipping rope and dancing, to see if competitiveness is task dependent. We find no gender difference in reaction to competition in any task; boys and girls compete equally. Studies in different environments with different types of tasks are thus important in order to make generalizable claims about gender differences in competitiveness.     

Women's education and marriage decisions: Evidence from China

The faster increase in education among women compared with men has been underexplored. Thus, using Chinese data, we evaluate the impacts of a plausibly exogenous increase in educational attainment on women's marriage decisions. An extra year of education does not change women's decision to marry and leads to a brief delay of 0.12 years in their marriage age on average, which is much smaller than the delay among men. Although more educated women and men both have improved labour market outcomes, which may have increased their patience, men experience larger income growth than women do. Moreover, declining physical attractiveness at least partly explains why the delay is less than 1 year. Overall, the results are more reliable after addressing the endogeneity issue.     

EVOLUTION OF GENDER DIFFERENCES IN POST‐SECONDARY HUMAN CAPITAL INVESTMENTS: COLLEGE MAJORS

Although women in the United States now complete more college degrees than men, the distribution of college majors among college graduates remains unequal, with women about two‐thirds as likely as men to major in business or science. We develop and estimate a dynamic, overlapping generations model of human capital investments and labor supply. We allow for specific college major choices, instead of aggregating these choices to the education level. Results show that changes in skill prices, higher schooling costs, and gender‐specific changes in home value were each important to the long‐term trends.     

Does housework lower wages? Evidence for Britain

This paper uses the British Household Panel Survey to present the first estimates of the housework-wage relationship in Britain. Controlling for permanent unobserved heterogeneity, we find that housework has a negative impact on the wages of men and women, both married and single, who work full-time. Among women working part-time, only single women suffer a housework penalty. The housework penalty is uniform across occupations within full-time jobs but some part-time jobs appear to be more compatible with housework than others. We find tentative evidence that the housework penalty is larger when there are children present.     

Building the Family Nest: Premarital Investments, Marriage Markets, and Spousal Allocations

We develop a transferable utility model of the household in which the marriage market is characterized by (negative or positive) assortative matching, and spousal allocations are determined by premarital investments. We demonstrate that all sharing rules along the assortative order support efficient outcomes both in terms of premarital investments and intra-household allocations. The efficiency of premarital choices and household allocations then enables us to show that, for each couple, the marriage market generates a unique and maritally sustainable sharing rule that is a function of the distribution of premarital endowments and the sex ratios in the market. According to our results, transfers among spouses occur on two margins: premarital investments and intra-marital spousal allocations. Asymmetries in the sex ratios in the marriage markets produce gender differences in premarital investments and consumption that are larger for individuals with small premarital endowments than those with larger endowments. A corollary of these findings is that, when men are in short supply in the marriage markets, women can invest more than men even when the returns to investment are lower or the costs are higher for women.     

Social context reveals gender differences in cooperative behavior

A number of previous researches indicate that men prefer competition over cooperation, and it is sometimes suggested that women show the opposite behavioral preference. In the current study the effects of social context on gender differences in cooperation are investigated. For the purpose, we compared men and women behavior under two social conditions: in groups of strangers and in groups with long-term socialization—groups of friends. The differences were found in changes in the level of cooperation, taking into account the effects of mixing social and gender variables. Social interaction and communication made cooperation of group members strength and sustainable. However, men’s and women’s cooperative behavior in groups differed. Women were initially more inclined to cooperate in interaction with strangers. Men showed greater sensitivity to sociality effects. They tended to make cooperative decisions more often if there were friends in the group. Furthermore, men cooperated with previously unknown people after socialization with them significantly more than women.     

A quantitative theory of the gender gap in wages

This paper measures how much of the gender wage gap over the life cycle is due to the fact that working hours are lower for women than for men. We build a quantitative theory of fertility, labor supply, and human capital accumulation decisions to measure gender differences in human capital investments over the life cycle. We assume that there are no gender differences in the human capital technology and calibrate this technology using wage–age profiles of men. The calibration of females assumes that children involves a forced reduction in hours of work that falls on females rather than on males and that there is an exogenous gender gap in hours of work. We find that our theory accounts for all of the increase in the gender wage gap over the life cycle in the NLSY79 data. The impact of children on the labor supply of females accounts for 56% and 45% of the increase in the gender wage gap over the life cycle among non-college and college females, while the rest is due to the exogenous gender differences in hours of work.     

Technology and worker coopratives: some UK evidence and a framework for investigation

This paper considers the relationship between cooperatives i n the 'new wave' and the technology they use. Data and examples from the UK are presented to show that there is no general support either for the 'optimistic' hypothesis that cooperatives are necessarily able to make humanizing choices about technology or for the 'pessimistic' hypothesis that they are completely constrained by technology. A framework is developed for analysing the factors which may or may not allow technological choices. The paper goes on to form a new hypothesis in two parts: firstly, that small firms i n general have more freedom to make choices about technology the more they have independence from large firms and the market, and the more they are i n areas of product innovation, particularly IT-based innovation; secondly, given a degree of freedom to make such choices, the choice is more likely to be made successfully in the direction of humanizing uses of technology the more there is potential for identif;cation between job, product and social or political aims. The paper concludes by describing a research project now under way exploring the relative importance of these factors in established UK worker cooperatives.     

Forecasting risk attitudes: An experimental study using actual and forecast gamble choices

We develop and evaluate a simple gamble-choice task to measure attitudes toward risk, and apply this measure to examine differences in risk attitudes of male and female university students. In addition, we examine stereotyping by asking whether a person's sex is read as a signal of risk preference. Subjects choose which of five 50/50 gambles they wish to play. The gambles include one sure thing; the remaining four increase (linearly) in expected payoff and risk. Each subject also is asked to guess which of the five gambles each of the other subjects chose, and is paid for correct guesses. The experiment is conducted under three different frames: an abstract frame where the two highest-payoff gambles carry the possibility of losses, an abstract frame with no losses, and an investment frame that mirrors the payoff structure of the former. We find that women are significantly more risk averse than men in all three settings, and predictions of both women and men tend to confirm this difference. While average guesses reflect the average difference in choices, only 27 percent of guesses are accurate, which is slightly higher than chance.     

Technology and worker coopratives: some UK evidence and a framework for investigation

This paper considers the relationship between cooperatives i n the ‘new wave’ and the technology they use. Data and examples from the UK are presented to show that there is no general support either for the ‘optimistic’ hypothesis that cooperatives are necessarily able to make humanizing choices about technology or for the ‘pessimistic’ hypothesis that they are completely constrained by technology. A framework is developed for analysing the factors which may or may not allow technological choices. The paper goes on to form a new hypothesis in two parts: firstly, that small firms i n general have more freedom to make choices about technology the more they have independence from large firms and the market, and the more they are i n areas of product innovation, particularly IT-based innovation; secondly, given a degree of freedom to make such choices, the choice is more likely to be made successfully in the direction of humanizing uses of technology the more there is potential for identif;cation between job, product and social or political aims. The paper concludes by describing a research project now under way exploring the relative importance of these factors in established UK worker cooperatives.     

The timing of first marriage and subsequent life outcomes: Evidence from a natural experiment

We study the consequences of later marriage on subsequent life outcomes. China’s family planning policies in the early 1970s – before the One-Child Policy – regulated not only childbirth but also marriage. The recommended minimum marriage age of 25 years for men and 23 years for women was effectively relaxed when the government formally introduced the One-Child Policy and put greater emphasis on directly controlling fertility rather than marriage. Subsequently, we find that the marriage age, which had been increasing steadily since 1970, suddenly started to decline in the early 1980s. This policy shift provides us with an opportunity to apply a regression probability jump and kink design for the purpose of identification. Using data from the 2000 census, we establish that later-married men have fewer children and that later-married women are more likely to participate in the labor market. We find no consistent evidence that later marriage improves education, probably because most Chinese people marry after completing their education.     

Recent trends in age-specific mortality in India

"In this paper we have analyzed the data from the Sample Registration System [SRS] on mortality by age and sex [in India] since 1970. Some of the major conclusions emerging from this analysis are: (i) Mortality has declined more rapidly among infants, children under 15 years and women of reproductive ages....(ii) Among adults, mortality has declined more rapidly among females than among males, the differential gain being largest in the age span 25-49. But in ages under 15, there is no evidence to suggest a gender differential in mortality decline. (iii) Among children and women of reproductive ages, mortality has declined more rapidly in urban areas than in rural areas but the reverse is true in the case of adult men.... The paper also analyzes the trends in mortality in major states of India during 1970-86." The authors observe a significant shift in patterns between 1978 and 1979, and conclude that this may be limited to changes in SRS data collection techniques.     

Bequests,gifts, and education: links between intergenerational transfers

We study the channels parents use to make transfers to their children. First, we focus on the relationship between investments in education and property transfers. Second, we turn to how property transfers are divided between inter vivos gifts and bequests. We use a Swedish dataset that is superior to previously used data as it contains information on both gifts and inheritances received from parents. We estimate models for the probabilities of having university education, receiving gifts, and receiving inheritances. In addition, we estimate models for gift and inheritance amounts. We find that the more resources parents have, the higher the likelihood of transfers, and that the correlation between receiving inter vivos gifts and inheritances is very high. Finally, women are more likely to have university education and to receive gifts, and daughters receive gifts of larger amounts than sons, although there are no differences in terms of inheritance.     

WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE, POLITICAL RESPONSIVENESS, AND CHILD SURVIVAL IN AMERICAN HISTORY

Women's choices appear to emphasize child welfare more than those of men. This paper presents new evidence on how suffrage rights for American women helped children to benefit from the scientific breakthroughs of the bacteriological revolution. Consistent with standard models of electoral competition, suffrage laws were followed by immediate shifts in legislative behavior and large, sudden increases in local public health spending. This growth in public health spending fueled large-scale door-to-door hygiene campaigns, and child mortality declined by 8-15% (or 20,000 annual child deaths nationwide) as cause-specific reductions occurred exclusively among infectious childhood killers sensitive to hygienic conditions.     

Conformity and the Demand for Environmental Goods

The existing literature on eco-labeling and green consumerism has been framed within a classical market context where price and quality are the drivers of consumer choice. However, it seems possible that consumers are also concerned about the choices made by other consumers. In fact, it is unclear that people’s consumption decisions are made independently of social context. For instance, under the desire to conform to certain social norms—or in the presence of status concerns—some individuals may be willing to pay a higher price premium for green products the more widespread green consumerism is in society. We test this hypothesis using a choice experiment where the respondents were asked to choose among coffee products varying with respect to their share of ecological beans, share of fair trade beans, and price. Three treatments were used, differing only in the information given about the choices made by other consumers. We find different responses to the treatments across individuals and we can only confirm our hypothesis of conformity for women, although men appear to have stronger preferences for ecological coffee than women have.     

Pricing competition: a new laboratory measure of gender differences in the willingness to compete

Experiments have demonstrated that men are more willing to compete than women. We develop a new instrument to “price” willingness to compete. We find that men value a $2.00 winner-take-all payment significantly more (about $0.28 more) than women; and that women require a premium (about 40 %) to compete. Our new instrument is more sensitive than the traditional binary-choice instrument, and thus, enables us to identify relationships that are not identifiable using the traditional binary-choice instrument. We find that subjects who are the most willing to compete have high ability, higher GPA’s (men), and take more STEM courses (women).