Guiltily Indebted? How a Word Can Affect Individual Borrowing

Tamara Bogatzki, David Stadelmann and Benno Torgler

CREMA Working Paper Series from Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA)

Abstract: Using World Values Survey data, we show that individuals whose primary language uses the same word for (financial) debt and (moral) guilt have a statistically significant and economically relevant lower probability of borrowing money. This relation holds even when we control for a large array of covariates, fixed effects, grammatical future tense reference, and Germanic language family.

Keywords: economics of language; debts; borrowing; behaviour (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 D83 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cra:wpaper:2019-03

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