I am a fourth-year PhD candidate at the Erasmus School of Economics and Tinbergen Institute, and a Marie Curie doctoral fellow within the European Social Science Genetics Network (ESSGN). My research uses administrative, survey and experimental data to study the role of genes, family environments, and parental investments in explaining educational and income inequalities.
Job market paper
Compensatory parental time investment: A survey experiment on beliefs and distributional preferences
How does parental time investment respond to children's abilities, and which beliefs or preferences explain these responses? Informed by a simple model of parental time allocation, we design hypothetical scenarios to elicit beliefs about the human capital production function and within-family inequality preferences in a representative sample from the Netherlands. On average, respondents clearly favor higher educational time investments in lower-ability children. Our results suggest that this compensating investment is driven by a desire to equalize educational outcomes between siblings, as well as a perceived substitutability between ability and investment. We further test the malleability of parental investment in an information provision experiment that randomly assigns respondents to receive either a low or high estimate of the heritability of primary school achievement. Respondents strongly update their beliefs in response to the information provision, but the treatment does not significantly alter perceived returns to investment, distributional preferences, or time allocations.
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References
Contact
Email: wienand@ese.eur.nl
Personal website: Tim Wienand