Games Parents and Adolescents Play: Risky Behaviors, Parental Reputation, and Strategic Transfers

Lingxin Hao, V. Joseph Hotz and Ginger Z. Jin

No 11872, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper examines reputation formation in intra-familial interactions. We consider parental reputation in a repeated two-stage game in which adolescents decide whether to give a teen birth or drop out of high school, and given adolescent decisions, the parent decides whether to house and support his children beyond age 18. Drawing on the work of Milgrom and Roberts (1982) and Kreps and Wilson (1982), we show that the parent has, under certain conditions, the incentive to penalize older children for their teenage risky behaviors in order to dissuade the younger children from the same risky behaviors. The model generates two empirical implications: the likelihood of teen risky behaviors and parental transfers to a child who engaged in teen risky behaviors will decrease with the number of remaining children at risk. We test these two implications, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 Cohort (NLSY79). Exploiting the availability of repeated observations on individual respondents and of observations on multiple siblings, we find evidence in favor of both predictions.

JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth
Note: CH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as Hao, Lingxin, V. Joseph Hotz, and Ginger Zhe Jin. “Games Parents and Adolescents Play: Risky Behaviors, Parental Reputation, and Strategic Transfers.” Economic Journal 118, 528 (April 2008): 515–555.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11872.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Games Parents and Adolescents Play: Risky Behaviour, Parental Reputation and Strategic Transfers (2008)
Journal Article: Games Parents and Adolescents Play: Risky Behaviour, Parental Reputation and Strategic Transfers (2008)
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:nbr:nberwo:11872

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11872

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().