The Trouble with Boys: Social Influences and the Gender Gap in Disruptive Behavior

NBER Working Paper No. 17541

Issued in October 2011

NBER Program(s):Children, Economics of Education, Labor Studies



This paper explores the importance of the home and school environments in explaining the gender gap in disruptive behavior. We document large differences in the gender gap across key features of the home environment - boys do especially poorly in broken families. In contrast, we find little impact of the early school environment on non-cognitive gaps. Differences in endowments explain a small part of boys' non-cognitive deficit in single-mother families. More importantly, non-cognitive returns to parental inputs differ markedly by gender. Broken families are associated with worse parental inputs and boys' non-cognitive development, unlike girls', appears extremely responsive to such inputs.

Acknowledgments

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w17541

Published: Marianne Bertrand & Jessica Pan, 2013. "The Trouble with Boys: Social Influences and the Gender Gap in Disruptive Behavior," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 5(1), pages 32-64, January. citation courtesy of

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