Abstract
Hierarchies in social identities have been found to be integrally related to divergences in economic status. In India, caste is one such significant social identity where continued discriminatory practices towards the lower castes have resulted in poor outcomes for them. While there is considerable work on such divergence on many economic outcomes along caste lines, there is no work on behavioral preferences and personality traits that can also be adversely affected by such identity hierarchies, and that are important determinants of educational attainments and labor market performances. We combine rich data from incentivized tasks and surveys conducted among a large sample of university students in a Seemingly Unrelated Regression framework and find that the historically marginalized Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SCSTs) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) fare worse than the upper castes along several dimensions of economic behavior such as competitiveness and confidence and personality traits such as grit, locus of control, and conscientiousness. Further, we find that parental investments only have limited compensatory effects on these gaps. This suggests a need for redesigning the structure of affirmative action policies in India as well as targeting interventions with an aim to improving soft skills among the disadvantaged.
Highlights
Hierarchies in social identities are often found to be highly correlated with corresponding inter-group differences in economic and social outcomes
Our main coefficients of interest in these regressions are the caste dummies: Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SCSTs) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs), with upper caste serving as the reference group
We examine caste-based differences in behavioral preferences and personality traits
Summary
Hierarchies in social identities are often found to be highly correlated with corresponding inter-group differences in economic and social outcomes. We examine caste gaps on a range of experimentally elicited behavioral preferences (such as competitiveness, confidence, risk preferences, and egalitarianism), and socioemotional traits (including Big Five traits, locus of control, and grit), among a large sample of university students in India. These dimensions become especially important in light of current work on the determinants of labor market performances. Our results inform that higher socioeconomic status and attendance at a private high school do have some compensatory effects for low castes but only on a small subset of the personality traits This suggests that parental investments are not sufficient, and there is an urgent need for redesigning the current structure of affirmative action policies.
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