Research
Publications
Measures of Cognitive Ability and Choice Inconsistency, with Marco Piovesan, Sarah Zaccagni and Erik Wengström, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 220 (2024): 495-506.
Cognitive skills affect individual choices. Researchers commonly use Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) tests and the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) to assess the relationship between cognitive abilities and economic decision making. In this paper, we study the relationship between these measures, and investigate the extent to which they are correlated and whether they are best described as substitutes or complements. Combining a sample of 686 children and a sample of 2,332 adults, we compare individual performances in the RPM test and CRT test. First, we report a significant positive correlation between the two measures of 0.3. Second, we document that performance in both the RPM test and CRT are significant predictors of behavioral inconsistency observed in incentivized time and risk preference elicitation tasks for children and risk preference elicitation task for adults.
Gender differences in competitiveness: Friends matter, with Lotte Kofoed Jørgensen and Marco Piovesan, Journal of Experimental and Behavioral Economics 101 (2022)
We run an experiment with Danish school children (7-16 years old) to shed new light on gender differences in competitive behavior. Danish girls are not significantly less likely than boys to choose a competitive scheme when we control for individual performance, risk preferences, confidence, stereotypes, and interactions with the opposite gender. However, for the children who perform above average we find a gender gap of 11.8 percentage points. Our elicitation of the network of friends allows us to study the association between a child's and their friends’ competitiveness: for each (extra) friend that is competitive, girls choose to compete more often (+9.6 percentage points). The same is not true for boys. Finally, boys become better at making the correct decision with age, but girls avoid competition when they should choose it.
Risk Preferences and Personality Traits in Children and Adolescents, with Marco Piovesan, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 186 (2021): 523-532.
We elicit both risk preferences and personality traits of 340 children aged 7–16 and enrolled in Danish schools: we elicit risk preferences using a modified–and simplified–version of the Bomb Risk Elicitation Task, and to measure personality traits we use the HEXACO (parent-report) questionnaire. Our results show that, on average, children are risk averse, become more risk taking with age, and that girls are, on average, more risk averse than boys. On the contrary, personality traits are stable across ages, except for a slight decrease in Openness to Experience. Personality and risk preferences are not correlated either when looking at raw correlations or regressions, including controls. The results suggest that risk preferences and personality traits are complementary measures of individual heterogeneity of behavior.
Working papers
Earnings, Parenthood and Gender Differences in Choice of Educational Field with Anne Toft Hansen, Michael A. Kuhn and Sally Sadoff
Gender differences in college major explain a large share of the gender gap in earnings. To examine potential reasons why men and women sort into different fields, we conduct a large-scale survey experiment among almost 20,000 college applicants that allows us to estimate their beliefs and preferences when choosing a college major. College applicants perceive significant tradeoffs associated with more heavily female majors, expecting lower earnings but increased likelihood of parenthood and partnership and higher work and educational satisfaction. Combining applicants’ beliefs and preferences, our results suggest that the biggest deterrent to women entering male dominated fields is their perception that they will have lower educational satisfaction during college. Examining within-gender heterogeneity, we find substantial differences between applicants entering female vs. male-dominated majors, particularly the weight they put on parenthood when selecting a field. Finally, in contrast to outcomes among prior cohorts of college graduates, we find no evidence that women anticipate lower earnings associated with motherhood. Our findings inform policies aimed at shifting the gender composition of college majors and subsequent gender earnings gaps.
Validating survey measures for children with Marco Piovesan
We design a survey to elicit Time Preferences, Risk Preferences, Altruism, Positive Reciprocity, Negative Reciprocity, and Trust in children and adolescents. We run this survey with a sample of 405 nine-year-old children for which we also collected the individual decisions in a series of incentivized choice experiments. Our econometric analysis allows us to select the 14 (out of 109) items that are jointly best at capturing children's incentivized behavior. Moreover, for each of the six preferences elicited, we compare the predictive power of this 14-item survey with a shorter self-evaluation survey (9 items). Our validated surveys can measure (easily and reliably) individual preference and, thus, represent valuable tools for all those researchers interested in capturing heterogeneous effect when subjects of a specific policy are children and adolescents.
Work in progress
Student attention and digital devices, with Ulrik Lyngs and Maya Møller-Jensen
Cooperation in semi-randomly formed networks , with Andreas Bjerre Nielsen, Martin Benedikt Busch and Ingo Zettler
Opinion
Digitale data og forskning i det hybride arbejdsliv, med Sofie Læbo Astrupgaard, David Dreyer Lassen og Morten Axel Pedersen,Tidsskrift for Arbejdsliv
Støttet af ERC: H2020 European Research Council (grant number 834540).
In Danish