Do sex hormones at birth predict later-life economic preferences? Evidence from a pregnancy birth cohort study

Economic preferences may be shaped by exposure to sex hormones around birth. Prior studies of economic preferences and numerous other phenotypic characteristics use digit ratios (2D : 4D), a purported proxy for prenatal testosterone exposure, whose validity has recently been questioned. We use direct measures of neonatal sex hormones (testosterone and oestrogen), measured from umbilical cord blood (n = 200) to investigate their association with later-life economic preferences (risk preferences, competitiveness, time preferences and social preferences) in an Australian cohort (Raine Study Gen2). We find no significant associations between testosterone at birth and preferences, except for competitiveness, where the effect runs opposite to the expected direction. Point estimates are between 0.05–0.09 percentage points (pp) and 0.003–0.14 s.d. We similarly find no significant associations between 2D : 4D and preferences (n = 533, point estimates 0.003–0.02 pp and 0.001–0.06 s.d.). Our sample size allows detecting effects larger than 0.11 pp or 0.22 s.d. for testosterone at birth, and 0.07 pp or 0.14 s.d. for 2D : 4D (α = 0.05 and power = 0.90). Equivalence tests show that most effects are unlikely to be larger than these bounds. Our results suggest a reinterpretation of prior findings relating 2D : 4D to economic preferences, and highlight the importance of future large-sample studies that permit detection of small effects.


07-Sep-2020
Dear Dr van Leeuwen, Your manuscript has now been peer reviewed and the reviews have been assessed by an Associate Editor. The reviewers' comments (not including confidential comments to the Editor) and the comments from the Associate Editor are included at the end of this email for your reference. As you will see, the reviewers differ in their opinion of the manuscript, but based on the Associate Editor's evaluation we would like to invite you to revise your manuscript to address the issues raised.
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Best wishes, Professor Loeske Kruuk Editor mailto: proceedingsb@royalsociety.org Associate Editor Comments to Author: The manuscript has been reviewed by two experts in the field. Both reviewers like the topic and potential fit for the Journal. I am also generally supportive of the publication of large 'failedreplication' style manuscripts. While Reviewer 1 has only minor suggestions for improvement, Reviewer 2 was quite critical, and thinks that extensive new analyses would be necessary before one could conclude that there were no effects in the data. As the analyses that are currently undertaken are quite simple, I have some sympathy for this position. At the same time, I do understand that the authors might be resistant to this, given that they had a pre-registration, including a pre-analysis plan. I think that a solution might be for the authors to undertake an additional set of analyses and present them in a different section. It would need to be made extremely clear in the MS that these additional analyses were undertaken to satisfy reviewer concerns, and were not part of the pre-registration. It is also more generally important for the authors to make it extremely clear how closely the pre-registration was followed (see Reviewer 1's comments on this), and to flag any deviation from that pre-registration, no matter how small.
In addition to the comments of both reviewers, I would add that I felt that the structure of the manuscript could be clearer. I would cut the last paragraph of the Introduction, which unnecessarily summarizes the findings -save that for the Discussion. There could usefully be a clearer structure (e.g. aims or objectives, or hypotheses with predictions) laid out at the end of the Introduction that could be used to give the manuscript some explicit structure as subheadings in the Results section. Finally, I would add that details are missing on how individuals were characterized as men or women -by self-report? Please also be consistent in your terminology, I think you should use men and women throughout, not e.g. "females".
Reviewer(s)' Comments to Author: Referee: 1 Comments to the Author(s) This is a very interesting paper, resulting from a rigorously executed study on an important topic. I think it's particularly important to publish null results that come from high powered well designed studies like this one, especially when the literature is full of small studies with some "researcher degrees of freedom". The data on hormones at birth used here is really unique and any results are thus interesting. I recommend Accept and just have some minor comments. Addressing these could hopefully make the already very good paper even clearer. My comments appear below in their order of appearance.
Abstract: I think it would be great to know something about the sample size or power already here.
Pre-analysis plan: Is the pre-analysis plan fully followed? It would be informative if the main text could include a clear statement on this. In the SM it says "We pre-registered the main analysis and the way our variables are constructed." Can this be clarified some so that the reader does not need to look at the pre-analysis plan but can understand what tests were pre-specified?
Intro: Perhaps the authors could elaborate somewhat more on why these preferences are interesting to explore, besides in economic models?
Sample sizes: Some sample sizes are mentioned in the intro and some in the methods. Perhaps explain the discrepancies?
Risk measure: Maybe I misunderstood something, but how are participants with multiple switching points treated? (Minor point -Dohmen et al. use a 0-10 scale so perhaps say that your measure is very similar to Dohmen et al?) Competitiveness measure: Is the competitive tournament performance compared to someone else's part 1 or part 2 performance? If the latter, anyone's or just those who chose to compete? I'm assuming that in cases of ties participants were paid?
Patience: Perhaps include a sentence on how this question has been validated, for those that do not know Falk et al? Are gender differences in patience robust? E.eg. for risk preferences I know there is typically a gender difference but with patience I thought it was less clear.
Digit ratios: Just some more info here could be interesting -e.g. were there two raters per hand and what was there correlation? Or just one? Were there any "outliers" and how were these treated? Figure 2: Is this the average of the two hands for 2D:4D?

Do you have any ethical concerns with this paper? No
Comments to the Author The authors have done a great job addressing the comments that were raised. I would suggest that the p-values are kept in the main text for those of us who are interested in p-values.

Review form: Reviewer 2
Recommendation Accept with minor revision (please list in comments)

Scientific importance: Is the manuscript an original and important contribution to its field? Excellent
General interest: Is the paper of sufficient general interest? Good Quality of the paper: Is the overall quality of the paper suitable? Good Is the length of the paper justified? Yes Should the paper be seen by a specialist statistical reviewer? No Do you have any concerns about statistical analyses in this paper? If so, please specify them explicitly in your report. No It is a condition of publication that authors make their supporting data, code and materials available -either as supplementary material or hosted in an external repository. Please rate, if applicable, the supporting data on the following criteria.

Do you have any ethical concerns with this paper? No
Comments to the Author See attached file.

30-Oct-2020
Dear Dr van Leeuwen, Your manuscript has now been peer reviewed and the reviews have been assessed by an Associate Editor. The reviewers' comments (not including confidential comments to the Editor) and the comments from the Associate Editor are included at the end of this email for your reference. As you will see, we are all agreed that the manuscript is close to acceptance, but one of the reviewers and the Associate Editor have made some suggestions that would greatly improve the manuscript and we would like to invite you to revise your manuscript to address them.
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Best wishes, Professor Loeske Kruuk Editor, Proceedings B mailto: proceedingsb@royalsociety.org Associate Editor Comments to Author: The manuscript has been re-reviewed by the original two experts in the field. Both reviewers found the manuscript to be much improved, and I agree with them. While Reviewer 1 judged that the manuscript would now be suitable for publication, Reviewer 2 still had a number of further comments. While we do not typically offer the opportunity for multiple rounds of review, I think that these further reviewer comments could usefully be addressed. In addition to the comments of both reviewers, I would add that I still felt that the structure of the manuscript could be a lot clearer. While the authors do now lay out two main aims at the end of the Introduction, it is hard to map these through the manuscript. The two aims are not used to structure either the methods or the results with subsections and subheadings. The Results section has seven subsections. To take the first three subsection titles, if analyzing "Testosterone at birth and adult 2D:4D", "Sex differences in economic preferences", and "Testosterone at birth and economic preferences" are all aims of the study, why not say so at the end of the introduction? A well-structured manuscript has a clear structure of aims/objectives or hypotheses with predictions that can be tracked easily through the manuscript. Analyses relating to one study aim should not be split across multiple results subsections as in the present manuscript -it just makes the study unnecessarily hard to follow. Decision letter (RSPB-2020-1756.R2)

27-Nov-2020
Dear Dr van Leeuwen I am pleased to inform you that your manuscript entitled "Do sex hormones at birth predict laterlife economic preferences? Evidence from a pregnancy birth cohort study" has been accepted for publication in Proceedings B.
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Thank you for your fine contribution. On behalf of the Editors of the Proceedings B, we look forward to your continued contributions to the Journal.
Thank you for giving us the possibility to revise our manuscript (RSPB-2020-1756). We greatly appreciate the effort that you, the associate editor and the two referees have put into it. The questions, comments and recommendations that the associate editor and the referees raised helped us to improve the paper.
We have prepared a response letter with point-by-point replies to all the comments and suggestions raised by the associate editor and the referees. We believe that we have managed to follow the recommendations of the associate editor and the referees throughout.
The main changes are: 1. We added two new subsections to the results section of the paper, where we discuss power, equivalence tests and multiple hypotheses testing. 2. We make clear in the methods and results sections of the manuscript how we followed the pre-registration, where we deviated and why. 3. We are more nuanced about our claims about the absence of observed associations. In particular, we propose to change the title to: "No evidence for a link between sex hormones at birth and later-life economic preferences". 4. We moved details on how we measured economic preferences to the supplementary materials in order to comply with the page limit.
Thank you again for your suggestions and the possibility to revise our manuscript. We are looking forward to hearing from you.

Boris van Leeuwen Paul Smeets Jeanne Bovet Gideon Nave Jonathan Stieglitz Andrew Whitehouse
Appendix A

Response to the Associate Editor
The manuscript has been reviewed by two experts in the field. Both reviewers like the topic and potential fit for the Journal. I am also generally supportive of the publication of large 'failedreplication' style manuscripts.
Thank you. We appreciate your time devoted to our manuscript and your constructive comments.
They are very helpful in further strengthening our manuscript. We address all your comments pointby-point.
While Reviewer 1 has only minor suggestions for improvement, Reviewer 2 was quite critical, and thinks that extensive new analyses would be necessary before one could conclude that there were no effects in the data. As the analyses that are currently undertaken are quite simple, I have some sympathy for this position. At the same time, I do understand that the authors might be resistant to this, given that they had a preregistration, including a pre-analysis plan. I think that a solution might be for the authors to undertake an additional set of analyses and present them in a different section. It would need to be made extremely clear in the MS that these additional analyses were undertaken to satisfy reviewer concerns, and were not part of the pre-registration. It is also more generally important for the authors to make it extremely clear how closely the pre-registration was followed (see Reviewer 1's comments on this), and to flag any deviation from that pre-registration, no matter how small.
We agree with your proposed solution to present the additional analyses requested by Reviewer 2 in a new section. We now added subsections entitled "Power analyses and equivalence tests" and "Multiple hypotheses testing corrections" at the end of the results section (see pages 11-12) and made clear that these analyses were not part of the pre-registration. The main take away from these additional analyses is that they further corroborate our conclusion that we find no robust evidence for a link between sex hormones around birth and economic preferences.
We now also make clear in the methods section of the manuscript (see pages 7-8) how we followed the pre-registration, where we deviated and why. In particular, we now write: "We pre-registered the main analyses and the way our variables are constructed. In addition to the comments of both reviewers, I would add that I felt that the structure of the manuscript could be clearer. I would cut the last paragraph of the Introduction, which unnecessarily summarizes the findings -save that for the Discussion.
We followed your suggestion and deleted the last paragraph of the introduction.
There could usefully be a clearer structure (e.g. aims or objectives, or hypotheses with predictions) laid out at the end of the Introduction that could be used to give the manuscript some explicit structure as subheadings in the Results section.
Thank you for this suggestion. The last paragraph of the introduction (page 4) now states the objectives of our study. Specifically, we added: We structure the results section according to these objectives.
Finally, I would add that details are missing on how individuals were characterized as men or women -by self-report? Please also be consistent in your terminology, I think you should use men and women throughout, not e.g. "females".
Individuals are categorized by the sex that was determined at birth. We clarified this on page 6, by adding: "We characterize study participants as men or women based on the biological sex that was determined at birth." We now also use "men" and "women" throughout the text.

Response to Referee 1
This is a very interesting paper, resulting from a rigorously executed study on an important topic. I think it's particularly important to publish null results that come from high powered well designed studies like this one, especially when the literature is full of small studies with some "researcher degrees of freedom". The data on hormones at birth used here is really unique and any results are thus interesting. I recommend Accept and just have some minor comments. Addressing these could hopefully make the already very good paper even clearer. My comments appear below in their order of appearance.
Thank you for your fair assessment of our paper and your constructive comments, which helped to further strengthen the manuscript. We address all your comments point-by-point.
Abstract: I think it would be great to know something about the sample size or power already here.
In the revised manuscript, we included the sample sizes in the abstract. As the sample sizes vary somewhat between analyses, we opted to include the smallest numbers (n=200 for testosterone at birth, n=533 for 2D:4D). We discuss power in the new subsection "Power analyses and equivalence tests" (page 11) and mention power and equivalence tests in the abstract as well, where we write: "Our sample size allows detecting effects larger than 0.22 SD for testosterone at birth, and 0.14 SD for 2D:4D (α=0.05 and power=0.90). Equivalence tests show that for most associations, effects are unlikely to be larger than these bounds." Pre-analysis plan: Is the pre-analysis plan fully followed? It would be informative if the main text could include a clear statement on this. In the SM it says "We pre-registered the main analysis and the way our variables are constructed." Can this be clarified so that the reader does not need to look at the pre-analysis plan but can understand what tests were pre-specified?
Thank you for this suggestion. We now discuss how we implemented the pre-analysis plan on pages 7-8 and when discussing the results, we are now more explicit about which analyses were not preregistered. In particular, on pages 7-8 we now write: "We pre-registered the main analyses and the way our variables are constructed. Sample sizes: Some sample sizes are mentioned in the intro and some in the methods.

Perhaps explain the discrepancies?
In all analyses, we included all available data. As we have missing data for some of the variables (T, 2D:4D and economic preferences), sample sizes differ sometimes. We mention this in the methods section on page 8: As we use the Eckel-Grossman method to elicit risk attitudes in an incentivized way, multiple switching points are not possible. Participants selected one out of six lotteries to be played out, from which we infer their risk tolerance. Performance is compared to someone else's performance in part 2. This was a randomly selected other, so not necessarily someone who also chose to compete. This is different from the original Niederle-Vesterlund task, where there are 3 parts. Comparing the performance against a randomly selected other basically makes the choice of payment scheme an individual decision-making task, as the choice of the payment scheme does not affect others' payments, just like in the original Niederle-Vesterlund task. As the experiment was conducted online, we opted for this simplified version of the Niederle-Vesterlund task. We based this on the experimental design of Buser, Geijtenbeek and Plug (2018). On page 3 of the SM, we now mention explicitly: "If they choose 'tournament', their Part 2 score will be compared with that of a randomly selected other participant (who could have chosen either payment scheme)." In case of a tie, participants were indeed paid (10 AUD per correctly solved puzzle), thank you for reading carefully and pointing this out. We now mention this on page 3 of the SM: "… , in case of a tie they receive 10 AUD ( In the dataset that we have access to, we only have measures from one rater. We included all data in the analyses, so also any potential outlier. In Figure 2, we show the estimates for both the left and the right hand 2D:4D separately (each in different shading). We added colors to the figure make the figure easier to read. Average 2D:4D is reported in Figure S5. In all cases, we find no significant association between 2D:4D and preferences. To test for equivalence, we use the "two one-sided tests" (TOST) procedure (see for example Lakens (2017)). Fig. S10 and  Thank you for your fair assessment of our paper and your constructive comments, which helped to further strengthen the manuscript. We address all your comments point-by-point.

Major issues
The authors draw the conclusion that there is "no link between sex hormones at birth and laterlife economic preferences." However, the results do not provide strong support for this conclusion for several reasons. Thank you for these excellent suggestions. We now discuss those in the Discussion section on page 13:

The study is underpowered to detect the small effect sizes expected for associations between sex hormones measured at birth and economic preferences later in life.
"An important avenue for future research is to investigate the relation between sex hormones and economic preferences in larger samples. Studies in neuroscience and endocrinology often rely on small samples reducing the power of the conducted tests (Button et al., 2014;Parslow et al., 2019). In the revised manuscript, we also followed your suggestion to be more nuanced about our claims.
In particular, we changed the title to:

"No evidence for a link between sex hormones at birth and later-life economic preferences".
We also created a new subsection "Power analyses and equivalence tests" in which we provide additional analyses to shed more light on power and detectable effect sizes (see our response to your second comment). Thank you for these suggestions. Indeed, the absence of evidence for an effect is not evidence of its absence. We followed your suggestion to conduct equivalence tests, which we report in the new subsection "Power analyses and equivalence tests" (page 11). In the new subsection we now state: To test for equivalence, we use the "two one-sided tests" (TOST) procedure (see for example Lakens (2017)). Fig. S10 and  We agree, and followed your suggestion to be more nuanced about our claims across the manuscript, including the abstract and title, which we propose to change to: "No evidence for a link between sex hormones at birth and later-life economic preferences". We also removed the somewhat ambiguous claim about "precise null effects" from the abstract and other places in the text.

The authors cannot
We further agree with you that additional studies with larger sample sizes will be very useful to shed more light on the relation between sex hormones at birth and later-life economic preferences. We now clarify this in the discussion section on page 13: We also refer to this in the abstract, to which we added: "Our sample size allows detecting effects larger than 0.22 SD for testosterone at birth, and 0.14 SD for 2D: 4D (α=0.05 and power=0.90). Equivalence tests show that for most associations, effects are unlikely to be larger than these bounds." Our results suggest a reinterpretation of results from prior 2D:4D studies predicting economic preferences, and other outcomes. Our results also highlight the importance of future large sample studies that permit detection of small effects." Regarding your suggestion of confidence intervals, we already included these in the manuscript alongside p-values, both in the text and the figures. We favor the approach to keep both the CI and p-values, but are open to dropping the p-values.

There is ambiguity about what criteria the authors are using to draw conclusions about
whether a particular effect is real/non-zero, and this leads to additional questions about the main conclusions. For example, the authors report two "significant" associations between sex hormones at birth and economic preferences later in life. One of these significant effects is reported in Figure 2, and the other is reported in Figure S4. At first glance, these "significant" effects seem at odds with the simplistic conclusion that there is "no link between sex hormones at birth and later-life economic preferences." In the discussion, the authors talk about only one of these effects and conclude that "this is likely a false positive, given the number of tests performed." The authors do not mention the other significant effect reported in Figure S4, and it not clear why. The authors are also ambiguous about the key number of tests that are being used to support this false positive conclusion. Based on the information the authors report, I am not fully convinced that the "significant" effects are definitely false positives. Several pieces of evidence suggest that these effects could be real and may be worthy exploring further in new studies. First, the significant association between total T at birth and competitiveness reported in Figure 2 replicates when using bioavailable T at birth as reported in Figure S4, when using ln(total T at birth) as reported in Figure S6, and in an analysis of men only as reported in Figure 3.
Second, the significant association between total AE ratio at birth and trust shows a very similar pattern and seems to just barely miss statistical significance when looking at bioavailable AE ratio, as reported in Figure S4.
Thank you for pointing this out. We now also discuss these additional significant findings on pages 9-10, where we write: " Fig. S3 shows associations between other hormonal measures that we pre-registered (BioT, AE ratio and BioAE ratio) and preferences, again controlling for sex. These results are comparable to total testosterone at birth. We find no robust associations between any of these hormonal measures and preferences. Out of 24 associations, we only find a significant ( In the discussion section, we no longer claim that the positive effects we found could be false positives, but rather included an additional discussion on sample size, power, Type S and Type M errors and point towards directions for future research. On page 13, we now write: "An important avenue for future research is to investigate the relation between sex hormones and economic preferences in larger samples. Studies in neuroscience and endocrinology often rely on small samples reducing the power of the conducted tests (Button et al., 2014;Parslow et al., 2019). It is also possible this AE ratio association with trust could be somewhat stronger in men,

but I did not see where such an analysis is reported (apologies if I missed this).
We did not report the associations between the AE ratio and preferences by sex in the previous version. In the new version, we report these analyses (as well as for bioavailable T and the bioavailable AE ratio) in Figure S4 and Table S3, and mention them on page 10, where we write: " Fig. S4 shows the associations for BioT, the AE ratio and the BioAE ratio by sex. For men, we find a significant (negative) association between BioT and competitiveness and a significant (positive) association between the AE ratio and trust. All other 46 associations, for either sex, are nonsignificant." Indeed, you are right that the significant associations between the AE ratio and trust and between bioavailable T and competitiveness appear to be driven by men: the associations for women are not statistically significant at the 5% level. We agree with you that it is helpful to formally correct for multiple hypotheses testing. In the preregistration we indicated to focus on eight main preference measures and four main hormone measures (total T, total AE ratio, BioT, BioAE ratio).
In total this results in 8x4=32 tests. We did not pre-register multiple comparison correction, yet see To ensure that our conclusions would not be driven by the flexibility that this analytical choice allows, we report adjusted p-values ("q-values") based on 32, 8 or 4 comparisons, both using Bonferroni corrections and False Discovery Rate (FDR) corrections (in Table S6). We find that only when we correct for four comparisons, the significant association between T and competitiveness remains significant at the q<.05 (corrected) level. For all other possibilities, the previously significant effects become nonsignificant. We discuss this in the new subsection "Multiple hypotheses testing corrections" on pages 11-12, where we write: "Following our pre-analysis plan, we did not correct for multiple hypothesis testing. We pre- Finally, please note that our multiple hypotheses corrections only focus on the main analyses. The 2D:4D analyses are not part of the main analyses that we specified in the pre-analysis plan.
Moreover, as all associations between 2D:4D and preferences are nonsignificant without correcting for multiple comparisons, such corrections would not affect our results.

It seems strange that the authors have not also reported analyses for total estradiol and
bioavailable estradiol. It seems they only consider estradiol in ratio analyses. Without these analyses, I do not think the authors can draw the strong conclusion that there is "no link between sex hormones at birth and later-life economic preferences". Perhaps the primary conclusions should be adjusted to match the analyses that are reported, or exploratory analyses with total estradiol and bioavailable estradiol can be added to the paper to evaluate the main conclusion with greater care.
Thank you for this suggestion. In the previous version of the paper, we focused on the hormone measures that we pre-registered as our main analyses. These were total T, bioavailable T, the total AE ratio and the bioavailable AE ratio. In the revised paper, we included additional analyses linking total estradiol and bioavailable estradiol to our eight preference measures. Figure S9 shows the results. None of the associations between total estradiol or bioavailable estradiol and economic preferences are statistically significant. We discuss this on page 11, where we write: "Also, for estrogen measures (estradiol (E2) and BioE2), none of the associations between estrogens and preferences is statistically significant." Thank you for the suggestion to explore moderators. Like you mentioned, we would need hormonal measurements around the same time that we measured economic preferences. Unfortunately, we

Another interpretation that would go against your conclusion that
do not have such measures. We therefore followed your suggestion to include discussion of the importance of moderators. In the discussion on page 13, we included: "It is also interesting to establish relevant moderators for the effects of hormones on outcome measures (see e.g. Schultheiss et al. (in press)). For example, one moderator could be levels of adult sex hormones." We choose for the discussion section to prevent making the abstract too long, but are open to include this in the abstract as well.

Additional suggestions
6. Sample size for the primary analyses is a crucial piece of information for interpreting the results that should be reported in the abstract.
We included the sample sizes in the abstract now. As the sample sizes vary somewhat between analyses, we opted to include the smallest numbers (n=200 for testosterone at birth, n=533 for 2D:4D). Umbilical cord blood is a relatively new measure of sex hormones. This means that the body of evidence is still relatively scant. We already included the relevant studies that we are aware of, which we discuss on page 4, where we write: We now also provide suggestions for future validation studies in the discussion section. On page 13 it now reads: "Moreover, umbilical cord blood measures of sex hormones are relatively new in the literature. We hope that future research will provide additional validation tests of this measure. These validation studies will provide a stronger basis for future studies using umbilical cord blood measures."

The authors should openly acknowledge the limitations of their study and recommend
future directions to address these limitations.
We followed your suggestions and included limitations and directions for future research both with regard to the validation of umbilical cord blood measures (see our response to your previous comment) and with regard to studies on sex hormones and economic preferences (see the response to comments 2 and 5). These points can be found in the discussion section on pages 12-13. In particular, we write: provide additional validation tests of this measure. These validation studies will provide a stronger basis for future studies using umbilical cord blood measures." 9. I appreciate the fact that the study was pre-registered, but pre-registration is not a panacea. Now that pre-registration is becoming more common, it is becoming clear that pre-registrations do not solve all problems, can serve many goals, and vary in their ability to constrain hypotheses, analyses, and results interpretation. Thus, rather than only saying the study was pre-registered and pointing to a link, the paper would benefit from the authors explaining what they think the benefits of the pre-registration were for this particular study relative to a situation in which they did not pre-register. This discussion could potentially be included in the supplemental material, with recommendations to improve pre-registrations in future studies.
You are right that pre-registration does not solve all problems. The main advantage of preregistering for our study is, in our view, that it restricts the degrees of freedom of researchers and precludes undisclosed flexibility in data analysis. In pre-registering the study, we spent most effort on being explicit about the main analyses and the way our variables are constructed. In the revised manuscript, on pages 7-8, we discuss the pre-registration plan in more detail and write: "We pre-registered the main analyses and the way our variables are constructed. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to revise and resubmit our manuscript (RSPB-2020-1756.R1). We greatly appreciate the time and effort that you, the associate editor and the two referees have put into it. We used your comments effectively to revise the paper.
Attached you will find a response letter with point-by-point replies to all the comments and suggestions raised by the associate editor and the referees. We believe that we have managed to follow the recommendations of the associate editor and the referees throughout.
The main changes are: 1. We reorganized the Results section to follow our main study aims more closely. We think this has improved the flow of the manuscript, and thank the Associate Editor for this suggestion. 2. We substantially revised the Discussion section. We now discuss what effect sizes could have been expected based on the literature and we included a "constraints on generality" statement. 3. Throughout the manuscript, we are more precise about our main findings, avoiding claims of "no evidence" and rather discussing the range of estimated effect sizes. In particular, we propose to change the title to: "Do sex hormones at birth predict later-life economic preferences? Evidence from a pregnancy birth cohort study".
Thank you again for your suggestions and the opportunity to revise and resubmit our manuscript. We believe the manuscript has been substantially improved compared to the previous version. We are looking forward to hearing from you.