Introduction
MINOR
The literature on behavioral economics claims that even minor emotional manipulations have a substantial impact on behaviors, decision-making, and economic outcomesRecent evidences show that programs targeting the socio-emotional dimensions of entrepreneurship are more highly correlated with success along key business metrics such as sales, survival, etc., than programs with a narrow, technical bentHowever, there is not a strong understanding of the mechanisms by which socio-emotional skills contribute to these measures of success. Testing for grit and locus of control, both important socio-emotional skills, has proven inconclusiveTo conduct this research, we leverage a randomized control trial implemented by the non-governmental organization (NGO) Youth Entrepreneurship in the north of Chile, which provides exogenous variation in participation in entrepreneurship programs. This NGO worked with a sample of eight schools, four of which were randomly assigned to an intervention that consisted of semester-long weekly 90-min workshops during which the students participated in different activities designed to improve their creative, entrepreneurial, and socio-emotional skills.To assess emotion regulation of the students in the program we used electroencephalography (EEG) recordings, employing methods borrowed from affective neuroscience. A major contribution of this paper is the use of neuroscientific techniques to quantify emotional regulation in large cohort, shifting the discussion from largely self-reported measures that form the basis of much of the literature on socio-emotional skills toward more objective brain-based measurements.Specifically, we find a significant correlation between emotion regulation biomarkers and educational outcomes, which supports the fact that emotion regulation is a potential mechanism driving these findings. We also find that the program affects not only the mean of emotion biomarkers, but also the variance of their distribution. Overall, this evidence provides support to the claim that changes in students’ emotion regulation capabilities partially explain the observed impact on educational outcomes.