Welcome!
I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in behavioral economics at DICE at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.
I recently completed my PhD at FAIR, NHH Norwegian School of Economics, and I am affiliated with the BIP Lab. I hold both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in economics from the University of Mannheim.
My research lies within the economics of education and behavioral economics.
Working Papers
Biased Parental Beliefs: Experimental Evidence from Norway
Parents’ beliefs about their children’s abilities shape parental behavior and decision-making. But do parents process information about their children’s abilities objectively or in a biased way? I study this question in a large-scale lab-in-the-field experiment with Norwegian elementary school students and their parents (N = 743 parent–child pairs) to examine how parents update beliefs when receiving noisy signals about their child’s performance in a cognitive (mathematics) or a non-cognitive (prosociality) skill. In mathematics, updating is symmetric, with parents being similarly responsive to both positive and negative signals. In prosociality, by contrast, parents update their beliefs more strongly to good signals but are significantly less responsive to negative signals. The asymmetry is particularly pronounced when signals are framed as reflecting parents’ own traits. Following negative prosocial signals, parents engage in ex-post rationalization: they rate their child’s effort and the relevance of the signals as lower. Survey evidence indicates that these domain differences stem from two factors: parents are better informed about their child’s performance in mathematics, and they view prosociality as more central to their child’s broader life success. Biased belief updating thus emerges when information is sparse and outcomes are ego-relevant, with important implications for how feedback is designed and delivered in educational contexts.
Parental Messages and Child’s Confidence
This paper studies how parents may curate the ego-relevant information children receive about themselves and how this information influences the beliefs and behavior of children. Using a lab-in-the-field experiment with Norwegian seventh-grade students and their parents, we show that parents send messages to their children that are systematically more favorable than parents’ private beliefs. Children incorporate these messages into their self-assessments: receiving a parental message raises their posterior beliefs about their relative performance. This increase in confidence does not, however, affect immediate quiz performance or the domain in which children choose to compete. Parents send slightly more favorable messages when children receive them before rather than after the quiz and are more likely to explain these messages in terms of motivating the child, consistent with anticipated motivational benefits shaping what parents communicate. These findings show that beliefs about ourselves depend not only on how individuals process information, but also on how others curate the information they receive.
Publications
Economic Mobility Beliefs and Parental Investment: Experimental Evidence
Economic theory predicts that parents invest more in children when expected returns are higher. We test whether beliefs about societal economic mobility affect these expectations and subsequent investment decisions. In an online experiment, 997 U.S. parents were randomly assigned to view information emphasizing either upward or downward economic mobility. Parents in the upward mobility condition reported higher perceived returns on investment and invested more time and resources: specifically, they allocated 16% more time to a child-focused task and reported 12% higher willingness to pay for educational resources. Results did not vary by parental income or education.
Economic Mobility and Parents’ Opportunity Hoarding
Two studies examine how American parents’ beliefs about the economy affect their support for policies and behaviors that give them and their child a “leg up,” even when this comes at the cost of other families’ access to educational and economic opportunities. Counterintuitively, the results show that believing in the American Dream increases affluent parents’ likelihood of engaging in such opportunity hoarding. In other words, affluent parents responded to the possibility that other people would be able to climb the socioeconomic ladder by trying to secure their own children’s future opportunities and limiting those available to less affluent parents and their children. These findings deepen understandings of the factors that contribute to rising economic inequalities.