When Parents Decide: Gender Differences in Competitiveness
通过两个大规模实地实验和行政数据，研究父母为子女选择的竞争程度，发现父母为儿子选择更多竞争，且这一差异主要由父母对子女竞争偏好的信念解释，并预测子女未来的教育成果。
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 artifactual field experiments with high-quality 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.