 Patience decreases with age for the poor but not for the rich: an international comparisonGiovanni Burro (), Rebecca McDonald, Daniel Read and Umar Taj Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2022, vol. 193, issue C, 596-621 Abstract: We introduce the Preference for Earlier versus Later Income (PELI) scale, measuring patience for over 50,000 individuals from 65 countries. We focus on the relationship between age and income on patience, two variables that have been widely studied in isolation. We find that, within countries, individuals in the richest income quintile are equally patient at any age while individuals in the poorest quintile are less patient the older they are. The relationships in the other quintiles are distributed in an orderly manner between these extremes. We derive a national patience index that correlates with characteristics linked to economic development, with cultural differences associated with patience, and with alternative more complex measures of patience. We recommend adopting PELI in international surveys. Keywords: Patience; Time Discounting; Age; Income; World (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:193:y:2022:i:c:p:596-621 DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2021.11.005 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D. More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier |
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