2022/04/12 by Shyamal Chowdhury, Matthias Sutter, Klaus F. Zimmermann · 55 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Demographic economics #Demography #Developing country #Economic growth #Economics #Expected utility hypothesis #Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics #Geography #Income, Poverty, and Inequality #Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies #Persistence (discontinuity) #Personality #Population #Prosocial behavior #Psychology #Risk aversion (psychology) #Scale (ratio) #Social preferences #Social psychology #Socioeconomic status #Sociology
paper · doi:10.1086/720395
published in Journal of Political Economy 130(9), 2361-2410 (University of Chicago Press)
openalex publication_date 2022/04/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Our large-scale experiment with 542 families from rural Bangladesh finds substantial intergenerational persistence of economic preferences. Both mothers’ and fathers’ risk, time, and social preferences are significantly (and largely to the same degree) positively correlated with their children’s economic preferences, even when controlling for personality traits and socioeconomic background. We discuss possible transmission channels and are the first to classify all families into one of two clusters, with either relatively patient, risk-tolerant, and prosocial members or relatively impatient, risk averse, and spiteful members. Classifications correlate with socioeconomic background variables. We find that our results differ from evidence for rich countries.