Non-Cognitive Skills in Children:
One of my main recent projects is a large-scale field project in elementary schools in Turkey. With Sule Alan we analyze attitudes such as patience, self-control, grit and perseverance in more than 3000 children in elementary schools in Istanbul, Turkey. This research agenda has two main components. The first component is to identify correlates of these attitudes, such as gender, family background or personality. The second is to explore the malleability of preferences and non-cognitive skills in children. The malleability part of the project is built around randomized educational interventions. For example, in the "forward- lookingness education" sub-project, we randomly assign schools to treatment and control groups, and we train the teachers in the (randomized) treatment group to present to their students ideas related to imagining future selves and exercising self-control. We then measure the effects on actual behavior through incentivized experiments. We estimate a significant average treatment effect of education on patience that is robust to the use of alternative preference elicitation methods such as multiple price list and convex time budget tasks, and persistent over a period of one year. That is, children who receive education demand a significantly lower premium to delay current consumption, with a larger effect on initially present-biased kids.
Field Experiments in India
The experiments I have conducted in the matrilineal and patriarchal tribes of Northeast India with my coauthors Steffen Andersen, Uri Gneezy, John List and Sandra Maximiano mainly aim to uncover the reasons behind observed gender differences in economic behavior. In Andersen et al. (2013), we study competitiveness in children and adolescents of ages 7-15, in matrilineal and patriarchal societies in the Meghalaya region. We find that while there are no gender differences at any age in a matrilineal society that has more equal gender roles, a gender difference materializes around puberty in a similar but patriarchal society, whereby girlsÕ competitiveness declines and boysÕ increases. This research highlights adolescence as a period that educational policies may need to focus on. Likewise, in Andersen et al.(2013) we explore, through a set of artefactual and natural field experiments on bargaining in India, whether gender differences in negotiations observed in the western world also exist in matrilineal societies where women are more frequently engaged in economic transactions in the actual marketplace. We find that female sellers earn a higher bargaining surplus than males in the matrilineal society in both the ÒlabÓ and the actual marketplace. These papers provide evidence highlighting the role of ÒnurtureÓ in shaping observed gender differences.
