Temporal Stability of Time Preferences

Stephan Meier () and Charles Sprenger
Additional contact information
Stephan Meier: Columbia University

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2015, vol. 97, issue 2, 273-286

Abstract: The preferences assumed to govern intertemporal trade-offs are generally considered to be stable economic primitives, though evidence on this stability is notably lacking. We present evidence from a large field study conducted over two years, with around 1,400 individuals using incentivized intertemporal choice experiments. Aggregate choice profiles and corresponding estimates of discount parameters are unchanged over the two years and individual correlations through time are high by existing standards. However, some individuals show signs of instability. By linking experimental measures to administrative tax records, we show that identified instability is uncorrelated with both levels and changes in sociodemographic variables. © 2015 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Keywords: stable economic primitives; intertemporal; aggregate choice; sociodemographic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E00 E01 Q11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (130)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00433 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:tpr:restat:v:97:y:2015:i:2:p:273-286

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().