Parental Paternalism and Patience

Lukas Kiessling, Shyamal Chowdhury (), Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch () and Matthias Sutter
Additional contact information
Shyamal Chowdhury: University of Sydney
Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch: Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Hannah Schildberg-Hoerisch ()

No 14030, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study whether and how parents interfere paternalistically in their children's intertemporal decision-making. Based on experiments with over 2,000 members of 610 families, we find that parents anticipate their children's present bias and aim to mitigate it. Using a novel method to measure parental interference, we show that more than half of all parents are willing to pay money to override their children's choices. Parental interference predicts more intensive parenting styles and a lower intergenerational transmission of patience. The latter is driven by interfering parents not transmitting their own present bias, but molding their children's preferences towards more time-consistent choices.

Keywords: parental paternalism; time preferences; convex time budgets; present bias; intergenerational transmission; parenting styles; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 D1 D64 D91 J13 J24 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 83 pages
Date: 2021-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp14030.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Parental Paternalism and Patience (2021)
Working Paper: Parental Paternalism and Patience (2021)
Working Paper: Parental Paternalism and Patience (2021)
Working Paper: Parental paternalism and patience (2021)
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:iza:izadps:dp14030

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().