Early Life Conditions, Time Preferences, and Savings

Brown Bag Seminar
Piggy bank being filled with coins

This study examines how early-life exposure to food scarcity influences individuals' long-term time preferences and savings behavior. To this end, we analyze hand-collected historical data on livestock availability during World War II at the province level, alongside detailed survey data on elicited time preferences and household savings.

Speaker
Date
Thursday 23 May 2024, 12:00 - 13:00
Type
Seminar
Room
Kitchen/Lounge E1
Building
E Building
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(with Effrosyni Adamopoulou and Eleftheria Triviza )

By leveraging differences across cohorts and provinces in a difference-in-differences framework, we find that individuals who experienced more severe scarcity during childhood develop higher levels of patience later in life and tend to hold more (precautionary) savings, conditional on income. Our findings suggest that exposure to protein scarcity during the first years of life and in utero can instigate a lasting increase in prudent behavior in the form of a coping mechanism.

See also

Individual Preferences for Truth-Telling

Lisa Spantig, (Aachen)
Image - Group of Happy People

The Ends of 27 Big Depressions

Martin Ellison (University of Oxford)
People standing outside on the street in line for the unemployed line to receive food

3rd Tinbergen Institute Public Economics Workshop

Bringing together leading scholars in public economics and adjacent fields from around the world.
ESE - Theil Building

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