Willingness to Compete: Family Matters

This paper studies the role of family background in explaining differences in the willingness to compete. By combining data from a lab experiment conducted with a representative sample of adolescents in Norway and high quality register data on family background, we show that family background is fundamental in two important ways. First, boys from low socioeconomic status families are less willing to compete than boys from better off families, even when controlling for confidence, performance, risk preferences, time preferences, social preferences, and psychological traits. Second, family background is crucial for understanding the large gender difference in the willingness to compete. Girls are much less willing to compete than boys among children from better off families, whereas we do not find any gender difference in willingness to compete among children from low socioeconomic status families. Our data suggest that the main mechanism explaining the role of family background is that the father’s socioeconomic status has a large effect on the boys’ willingness to compete, but no effect on the girls. We do not find any effect on the willingness to compete for boys or girls of the mother’s socioeconomic status or other family characteristic that may potentially shape competition preferences, including parental equality and sibling rivalry. ∗Department of Economics, NHH Norwegian School of Economics, 5045 Bergen, Norway. Emails: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]. We would like to thank Anna Dreber Almenberg, Loukas Balfoutas, Sam Bowles, Thomas Buser, Colin Camerer, Dirk Engelmann, Mathias Ekström, Uri Gneezy, Bill Harbaugh, Fabian Kosse, Andreas Nicklisch, Hessel Oosterbeek, Eva Ranehill, and Matthias Sutter for extremely valuable comments and suggestions; the municipal school authority in Bergen for their cooperation; Kristin Risvand Mo for administrative support; Atle Askeland, Bjørn Ivar Grøttå, and Sarah Marie Søiland for IT-support; and Eli Birgitte S. Bergsmark, Espen Bolghaug, Andreas Tufteland Engelsen, Kasper Thoring Fellkjær, Sebastian Fest, Ingar Haaland, Sigve Garsjø, Vi-Vi Ton Nu, Kristin Orset, Henrik Reigstad, Mari Sakkestad, Johanne Amundsen Wik, Kristina Øystese, and Silje Åsnes for research assistance. We would also like to thank Hallvard Føllesdal, who kindly made available a Norwegian translation of the Big Five Inventory made by Harald Engevik. The project was financed by support from the Research Council of Norway, research grant 185831, and administered by The Choice Lab.