The baking of preferences throughout the high school

IF 1.4 3区经济学 Q2 ECONOMICS

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics Pub Date : 2025-07-27 DOI:10.1016/j.socec.2025.102396

Antonio Alfonso , Pablo Brañas-Garza , Diego Jorrat , Benjamin Prissé , María José Vázquez-De Francisco

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Abstract

This study investigates gender differences in time and risk preferences and how this difference evolves during adolescence. Using a sample of 4,830 non-self-selected teenagers from 207 classes across 22 Spanish schools, we provide a detailed analysis of how boys and girls differ – or not – in economic preferences, and how these preferences change as they grow older. Our large and rich dataset includes information on class attributes, social networks, and friends’ preferences, allowing us to control for a wide range of potentially confounding variables. We find no significant gender differences in patience or risk attitudes at younger ages. However, we find that older adolescents tend to exhibit different patterns than younger ones—girls in higher grades show more nuanced time preferences, and boys in higher grades appear more risk averse than girls. These patterns are shaped by cognitive abilities and the social environment within classrooms. Our findings underscore the importance of considering gender-specific developmental trajectories when studying economic preferences during adolescence.

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整个高中的喜好变化

这项研究调查了性别在时间和风险偏好上的差异，以及这种差异在青春期是如何演变的。我们从西班牙22所学校的207个班级中选取了4830名非自主选择的青少年作为样本，详细分析了男孩和女孩在经济偏好上的差异，以及随着年龄的增长，这些偏好是如何变化的。我们庞大而丰富的数据集包括关于职业属性、社交网络和朋友偏好的信息，使我们能够控制广泛的潜在混淆变量。我们发现，在耐心或风险态度上，年龄较小的人没有显著的性别差异。然而，我们发现年龄较大的青少年往往表现出不同于年龄较小的青少年的模式——高年级的女孩表现出更细微的时间偏好，高年级的男孩表现出比女孩更厌恶风险。这些模式是由认知能力和教室内的社会环境形成的。我们的研究结果强调了在研究青少年经济偏好时考虑性别特定发展轨迹的重要性。

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来源期刊

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

2.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

113

审稿时长

83 days

期刊介绍： The Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly the Journal of Socio-Economics) welcomes submissions that deal with various economic topics but also involve issues that are related to other social sciences, especially psychology, or use experimental methods of inquiry. Thus, contributions in behavioral economics, experimental economics, economic psychology, and judgment and decision making are especially welcome. The journal is open to different research methodologies, as long as they are relevant to the topic and employed rigorously. Possible methodologies include, for example, experiments, surveys, empirical work, theoretical models, meta-analyses, case studies, and simulation-based analyses. Literature reviews that integrate findings from many studies are also welcome, but they should synthesize the literature in a useful manner and provide substantial contribution beyond what the reader could get by simply reading the abstracts of the cited papers. In empirical work, it is important that the results are not only statistically significant but also economically significant. A high contribution-to-length ratio is expected from published articles and therefore papers should not be unnecessarily long, and short articles are welcome. Articles should be written in a manner that is intelligible to our generalist readership. Book reviews are generally solicited but occasionally unsolicited reviews will also be published. Contact the Book Review Editor for related inquiries.