Parental Responses to Child Endowments

Authors
Affiliations

Pedro Carneiro

UCL, IFS and CEMMAP

Neil Davies

UCL

Sebastian Espinoza-Rojas

UCL

UCL

Published

October 2026

Work in progress.

This paper studies how parents adjust their investments in response to children’s endowments. Using the UK Millennium Cohort Study, it follows families from early childhood through adolescence and leverages variation in children’s inherited educational-attainment polygenic scores, conditional on their parents’ scores, to examine whether parental responses reinforce or compensate for differences between children.