Like Mother Like Son? Experimental Evidence on the Transmission of Values from Parents to Children

Olivier Jeanne, Marco Cipriani and Paola Giuliano

No 6305, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This paper studies whether prosocial values are transmitted from parents to their children. We do so through an economic experiment, in which a group of Hispanic and African American families play a standard public goods game. The experimental data presents us with a surprising result. We find no significant correlation between the degree of cooperation of a child and that of his or her parents. Such lack of cooperation is robust across age groups, sex, family size and different estimation strategies. This contrasts with the typical assumption made by the theoretical economic literature on the inter-generational transmission of values. The absence of correlation between parents' and children's behaviour, however, is consistent with part of the psychological literature, which emphasizes the importance of peer effects in the socialization process.

Keywords: Culture; Public goods game; Values (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 H41 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP6305 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Like mother like son? Experimental evidence on the transmission of values from parents to children (2013)
Working Paper: Like Mother Like Son? Experimental Evidence on the Transmission of Values from Parents to Children (2007)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:6305

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP6305

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().