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We all know that names matter. Unless you are Madonna's son, you probably couldn't get away with a name like "Rocco", and unless you are Frank Zappa's daughter, you are likely to suffer with a name like "Moon Unit". But there's more to it than this: names may matter much, much more than we think. A new CESifo Working Paper by Saku Aura and Gregory D. Hess investigates two questions which have long been of interest to linguists and sociologists. First, does a person's first name tell you anything about his background? Second, does it have any impact on such long-run economic outcomes as income and education? Their answer to the first question is a resounding "yes". For instance, black people tend to have less popular, more multi-syllabic, and more complicated names (measured, ingeniously, by the score one would get for the name if it were a word in the popular board game Scrabble.) Children of well-educated parents, in turn, tend to have more popular names with fewer syllables, more standard spellings, and more nicknames. In other words, because we think so long and hard about our children's names, they end up reflecting, at least in part, who we are. Their answer to the second question is a weaker "yes". Individuals with more popular names tend to be better educated, have more occupational prestige and income, and are less likely to have children before the age of 25. However, once exogenous background factors (such as race) are controlled for, popularity is an important predictor of the occupational prestige and fertility, but not income and education. Why do people's first names have anything to do with their economic outcomes? Aura and Hess suggest two possibilities: either individuals face discrimination based on their first names, or these names are correlated with factors that affect their labor productivity. What does it all mean? Should I be running to the registrar's office to change my son Roshaun's name to Robert and my daughter Affrica's name to Ann? Maybe — but then again, if everybody takes this paper as seriously as I do, then there won't be anything in a name after all! Saku Aura & Grerory Hess: What's in a Name?, CESifo
Working Paper No. 1190. |
Note: This text is the responsibility of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of either the CESifo Working Paper author(s) cited or of the CESifo Group Munich. Copyright
© CESifo GmbH 2004. All rights reserved. |
Most expectant parents spend obscene amounts of time mulling over prospective names for their unborn child. Some parents go so far as to hire baby name consultants. When discussing candidate names, they ask themselves, "Does it sound pleasant, have a nice meaning, is it easily pronounceable, what is its history, its etymology, how (un)common is it?"