Predicting Mid-Life Capital Formation with Pre-School Delay of Gratification and Life-Course Measures of Self-Regulation

Authors

Daniel J. Benjamin, University of Southern California
David Laibson, National Bureau of Economic Research
Walter Mischel, Columbia University
Philip K. Peake, Smith CollegeFollow
Yuichi Shoda, Lundquist College of Business
Alexandra Steiny Wellsjo, University of California, Berkeley
Nicole L. Wilson, University of Washington

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-1-2020

Publication Title

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

Abstract

How well do pre-school delay of gratification and life-course measures of self-regulation predict mid-life capital formation? We surveyed 113 participants of the 1967–1973 Bing pre-school studies on delay of gratification when they were in their late 40’s. They reported 11 mid-life capital formation outcomes, including net worth, permanent income, absence of high-interest debt, forward-looking behaviors, and educational attainment. To address multiple hypothesis testing and our small sample, we pre-registered an analysis plan of well–powered tests. As predicted, a newly constructed and pre-registered measure derived from preschool delay of gratification does not predict the 11 capital formation variables (i.e., the sign-adjusted average correlation was 0.02). A pre-registered composite self-regulation index, combining preschool delay of gratification with survey measures of self-regulation collected at ages 17, 27, and 37, does predict 10 of the 11 capital formation variables in the expected direction, with an average correlation of 0.19. The inclusion of the preschool delay of gratification measure in this composite index does not affect the index's predictive power. We tested several hypothesized reasons that preschool delay of gratification does not have predictive power for our mid-life capital formation variables.

Keywords

Delay of gratification, Mid-life capital formation, Self-regulation

Volume

179

First Page

743

Last Page

756

DOI

10.1016/j.jebo.2019.08.016

ISSN

01672681

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Rights

© 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license.

Comments

Archived as published.

Recommended Citation

Benjamin, Daniel J.; Laibson, David; Mischel, Walter; Peake, Philip K.; Shoda, Yuichi; Wellsjo, Alexandra Steiny; and Wilson, Nicole L., "Predicting Mid-Life Capital Formation with Pre-School Delay of Gratification and Life-Course Measures of Self-Regulation" (2020). Psychology: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/psy_facpubs/77