Unleveling the playing field? — Experimental evidence on parents’ willingness to give their children an advantage

Parents play a pivotal role in shaping opportunities and outcomes for their children. This paper provides unique evidence on parents’ willingness to give their children an advantage. I report from a large-scale lab-in-the-field experiment involving 895 pairs of parents and their adolescent children, which is linked to high quality administrative data. In a situation with equal opportunities, parents are given the opportunity to increase the likelihood of their child winning in a competition. I find that a substantial share of parents prioritizes their own child’s success at the expense of another child’s opportunity to succeed. A considerable share of parents help their child because they expect another to do the same, in which case helping ensures a level playing field. However, I also find evidence suggestive of parents holding self-serving beliefs about the helping decision of other parents. Finally, I provide evidence of the helping decision in the experimental situation being associated with children with below median grades in mathematics doing particularly well at school in situations where parents can directly influence their grade. Taken together, the paper provides the first set of systematic evidence on parents’ willingness to give their own children an advantage, and the findings provide new insights on the role of parents in human capital accumulation.