The short-term effect of COVID-19 on schoolchildren's generosity

ABSTRACT

We conduct two waves (W1 and W2) of an unincentivized online survey to measure the change in altruism of primary school students (N = 983) towards classmates and schoolmates during the school closures due to COVID-19. The W1 responses arrived, on average, after 39 days of online education, while W2 responses arrived, on average, 31 days after W1. There was no significant change in generosity both towards classmates and schoolmates between waves. Students with better cognitive abilities are less likely to become selfish towards schoolmates.

KEYWORDS:

• Altruism
• children
• generosity
• social preferences

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C99
• D91
• I24

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge support from the Institute of Economics’s internal grant that supported innovative research ideas during COVID-19. T.K./H.J.K. acknowledges support from the Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office NKFIH (grant number FK 125358/K 119683)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Research was approved by the Ethics Review Committee (Project FK125358) of the Centre for Social Sciences (TK CSS). Consents about students’ participation were obtained at multiple points: from school principals, then from teachers, and finally, via teachers, from parents.

² The school performance of the students in our sample was 0.2 standard deviations below the national average for maths and reading-comprehension tests.

³ Individuals give more to other individuals who are ”closer” to them (e.g. Branas-Garza et al., 2010).

⁴ Fuchs and Wößmann (2008) provide evidence that this measure is adequate.

⁵ Students had to answer four questions. We code this variable as the percentage of the correct answers.

⁶ We remove students from the data with missing answer to any of the altruism questions.

⁷ McNemar’s test indicates that social distance matters in the expected way: in both waves students are more generous to classmates than to schoolmates (p-values$<$0.001 in both cases).

⁸ Qualitatively identical results emerge if instead of GPA we consider the average of the maths tests in the surveys.

⁹ Out of 983 students, 767/88 did/did not lend to classmate in both waves. There were 57/71 who became more/less altruistic between waves. Regarding schoolmates, 346/420 did/did not lend in both waves, while 106/111 students became more/less altruistic between waves.

¹⁰ Instead of GPA we use the maths test results we obtain qualitatively the same finding.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Institute of Economics, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies [internal grant for innovative research ideas during COVID-19]; Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office NKFIH [FK 125358,K 119683].