Abstract

This paper examines the impacts of siblings on people's social preference, risk attitude and time preference with a data set from a large-scale lab experiment. Employing the variation of fine rates under One-Child Policy for excess birth in different regions as instrument to address the endogeneity of whether having siblings, we find that sibling's role mainly focuses on shaping people's social preference that subjects with siblings demand less as responders in ultimatum game and behave more cooperatively in sequential prisoner's dilemma. This conclusion survives through several robustness checks. Our further result suggests that more sibling interactions and less parental expectations are two potential mechanisms through which siblings play a role in making people more prosocial. Our findings point to a positive externality along with Two-Child Policy which is widely neglected in both policy evaluation and relevant theory such as quantity-quality theory, and provide implications for the fertility policy such as the recent Three-Child Policy in China and beyond.

内容提要：

该研究通过大规模行为实验探究兄弟姐妹个数对个人的社会偏好、风险偏好和时间偏好的影响。使用独生子女政策下对超生家庭的罚款率作为工具变量，该研究结果表明：拥有兄弟姐妹的被试在最后通牒博弈中表现得更加随和，在序贯囚徒困境中表现得更加合作。其原因是拥有兄弟姐妹的孩子会有更多的人际互动，承担较少来自父母高期望的压力。这些发现证实了二胎政策和三胎政策被忽略的潜在正外部性——使孩子更加亲社会。

论文链接：https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chieco.2021.101653

本文在线发表于China Economic Review 2021年第69卷。该期刊为best365网页版登录B+类奖励期刊，作者按姓氏字母排序。

作者邱彧为数理经济与数理金融系17级本科生。