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Using novel data from Luxembourg and comparative evidence from the UK and Australia, we document systematic under-reporting of children’s socio-emotional difficulties by parents – particularly for daughters.
A distinctive feature of our study is the joint measurement of first-order beliefs (how parents think their child feels) and second-order beliefs (how parents think their child reports feeling), allowing us to disentangle informational frictions from evaluative bias. We find that second-order beliefs are systematically biased and that their precision is negatively correlated with the level of distress reported by the child. Parents with more accurate second-order beliefs also provide closer and unbiased first-order assessments, suggesting that the negative difference between parent and child reports may arise from informational frictions rather than deliberate minimization. Misperceptions are more common among highly educated and employed parents, and in parent-child pairs with divergent personality traits. Interestingly, parents with more accurate priors about general parental under-reporting tend to show greater divergence from their child’s report in their first-order beliefs. An information treatment improves beliefs among parents who already hold priors about systematic discrepancies between parent and child reports, demonstrating the malleability of parental beliefs to light-touch interventions. We also provide exploratory evidence that receiving accurate information can influence parents’ intentions to invest in their children’s human capital.
About the Speaker
Dr Giorgia Menta is a post-doctoral researcher at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) and an Affiliate of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course. In 2021, she completed her PhD in Economics at the University of Luxembourg.
Her research interests lie in the field of applied microeconomics, with a focus on the economics of gender, health, education, and the labour market. Her research has been published in highly ranked peer-reviewed international outlets, such as the Journal of Health Economics and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
During her PhD, she developed an interest in social-science genomics, that is the integration of genetic data into social-science research. Recently, she has been working on how the genetic determinants of mental ill-health can interact with policy and family environment, contributing to the persistence of health and socio-economic inequalities.