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Health effects on children's willingness to compete

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Björn Bartling ,
Ernst Fehr  and
Daniel Schunk
Björn Bartling*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, University of Zurich, Blümlisalpstrasse 10, 8006 Zurich, Switzerland
Ernst Fehr*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics and Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research, University of Zurich, Blümlisalpstrasse 10, 8006 Zurich, Switzerland
Daniel Schunk*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, University of Zurich, Blümlisalpstrasse 10, 8006 Zurich, Switzerland Department of Economics, University of Mainz, Saarstraße 21, 55099 Mainz, Germany
*
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
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Abstract

The formation of human capital is important for a society's welfare and economic success. Recent literature shows that child health can provide an important explanation for disparities in children's human capital development across different socio-economic groups. While this literature focuses on cognitive skills as determinants of human capital, it neglects non-cognitive skills. We analyze data from economic experiments with preschoolers and their mothers to investigate whether child health can explain developmental gaps in children's non-cognitive skills. Our measure for children's non-cognitive skills is their willingness to compete with others. Our findings suggest that health problems are negatively related to children's willingness to compete and that the effect of health on competitiveness differs with socioeconomic background. Health has a strongly negative effect in our sub-sample with low socio-economic background, whereas there is no effect in our sub-sample with high socio-economic background.

Keywords

Willingness to competeNon-cognitive skillsHuman capitalHealthHousehold survey studies

JEL classification

I10: General C90: General J24: Human Capital • Skills • Occupational Choice • Labor Productivity
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 58 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

We would like to thank Jürgen Schupp, Katharina Spieß, and Gert Wagner from the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin (DIW) for their very generous support of this project. We also thank Sally Gschwend, Michel Maréchal, and Sonja Vogt for detailed comments, as well as Agnes Jänsch and Andreas Stocker from TNS Infratest for the implementation of the experiments and organization of the interviews. Financial support from the Research Priority Program on the “Foundations of Human Social Behavior” at the University of Zurich is gratefully acknowledged.

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