Search Results

Title: Games Parents and Adolescents Play: Risky Behaviors, Parental Reputation, and Strategic Transfers
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Hao, Lingxin
Hotz, V. Joseph
Jin, Ginger Zhe
Games Parents and Adolescents Play: Risky Behaviors, Parental Reputation, and Strategic Transfers
Working Paper, Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University, January 2005
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University
Keyword(s): Adolescent Fertility; Childbearing, Adolescent; Family Resources; School Dropouts; Siblings; Transfers, Family; Transfers, Parental

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

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.
Bibliography Citation
Hao, Lingxin, V. Joseph Hotz and Ginger Zhe Jin. "Games Parents and Adolescents Play: Risky Behaviors, Parental Reputation, and Strategic Transfers." Working Paper, Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University, January 2005.