The Impact of Growth on the Transmission of Patience
CESifo, Munich, 2022
CESifo Working Paper No. 9829
Patience affects economic growth, no news. This paper investigates the opposite causal relationship, i.e., how growth influences patience. We propose a simple theoretical framework where heterogeneous parents may choose to transmit their cultural trait - patience - to their offspring. Our model shows that parental effort to educate children to patience positively depends on economic growth. We test empirically this result using both country-level and individual data and show that, coherently with the model’s prediction, growth has a significant impact on the effort to teach patience.
Fiscal Policy, Macroeconomics and Growth
Behavioural Economics