Fabian Kosse

Research Focus

Fabian Kosse’s main research interest lies in the interplay of economics and developmental as well as personality psychology. He is especially interested in how preferences, personality, beliefs, and skills are formed and he particularly focuses on the role of early social environment and life circumstances. Moreover, he also explores consequences of individual heterogeneities on educational, health and labor market outcomes. Methodically, he combines long-term field experiments with micro econometric panel data methods, incentivized measures and the use of biomarkers.

My plans for the fellowship period

I will primarily build upon the “Your Goals, Your Way” panel, which focuses on how the early social environment of children influences their formation of preferences and personality. The main component of the “Your Goals, Your Way” panel is the intervention program “Baloo and You”, which was implemented as a RCT in 2011/2012, providing elementary school students with a mentor for the timespan of one year. With the help of the fellowship, I plan to design, collect and analyze the new chapter of data collections focusing on late adolescence to young adulthood (2020-2022). I plan to proceed in two steps. Firstly, two additional measures of preferences and personality will be designed and included as part of the new data collections. The focus of the second step will be on the development of happiness as an important summary outcome variable to give insights into the general long-term consequences of inequalities arising during childhood.

How will my work change children’s lives?

The aim of my research is to enhance our understanding of the malleability of individual inequalities. Evaluating the effectiveness of an intervention programs and understanding whether and how mentoring programs help to change preference patterns and skill levels in the long-run is of relevance not only for behavioral sciences but also for informing policy, as it helps to uncover reasons for social mobility and target intervention programs. To this effect, especially the understanding of malleability of skills, preferences and personality in response to social environment is of great interest.