The formation of economic preferences in childhood and adolescence has long-term consequences for life-time outcomes. We study in an experiment with 525 teenagers how both birth order and siblings’ sex composition affect risk, time and social preferences. We find that second born children are...

In this paper, we use 2008-2013 American Community Survey data to update and further probe evidence on son preference in the United States. In light of the substantial increase in immigration, we examine this question separately for natives and immigrants. Dahl and Moretti (2008) found earlier...

This paper presents evidence from a large-scale study on gender differences in expected wages before labor market entry. Based on data for over 15,000 students, we document a significant and large gender gap in wage expectations that closely resembles actual wage differences, prevails across...

We study the effect of childbirth on local and non-local employment dynamics for both men and women using Belgian social security and geo-location data. Applying an event-study design that accounts for treatment effect heterogeneity, we show that 75 percent of the effect of the birth of a first...

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 high-quality longitudinal administrative...

This paper analyzes historical census data from the final Soviet census in 1989. We find that, even in the absence of sex-selective abortions, the fertility decisions of Armenian, Georgian, and Azeri parents living in Russia in the late 1970s and the 1980s were significantly more son-biased than...

We study the relationship between a key early intervention policy designed to support families with children up to the age of four and the rate at which children are taken into social care. The gradual build-up of over 3,600 Sure Start Children's Centres (SSCC), operated by Local Authorities...

We study the socio-economic determinants of child (girls below age of 19 years) marriage using a panel data of thirty Iranian provinces from 2007 to 2015. Our panel fixed effects and generalized method of moments (GMM) estimations show that the level of income per capita (with negative effect),...

We explore the effects of a child labor regulation that changed the legal working age from 14 to 16 over the health of their offspring. We show that the reform was detrimental for the health of the son’s of affected parents at delivery. Yet, in the medium run, the effects of the reform are...

Discrimination is an ubiquitous phenomenon in many societies, but little is known about its origins in childhood. In a framed field experiment, we let 142 three to six-year old preschool children allocate a fixed endowment between an in-group and an out-group receiver in two domains (gender and...