Valuing the Future: Changing Time Horizons and Policy Preferences

Alexander F. Gazmararian

No 2m9fy, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: The short time horizons of citizens is a prominent explanation for why governments fail to tackle significant long-term public policy problems. Actual evidence of the influence of time horizons is mixed, complicated by the difficulty of determining how individuals' attitudes would differ if they were more concerned about the future. I approach this challenge by leveraging a personal experience that leads people to place more value on the future: parenthood. Using a matched difference-in-differences design with panel data, I compare new parents with otherwise similar individuals and find that parenthood increases support for addressing climate change by 4.3 percentage points. Falsification tests and two survey experiments suggest that longer time horizons explain part of this shift in support. Not only are scholars right to emphasize the role of individual time horizons, but changing valuations of the future offer a new way to understand how policy preferences evolve.

Date: 2024-04-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/66103d6b943bee22f1dfed66/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:2m9fy

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/2m9fy

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().