EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Longevity and Patience

Armin Falk, Johannes Hermle and Uwe Sunde
Additional contact information
Johannes Hermle: UC Berkley
Uwe Sunde: LMU Munich

No 201, Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series from CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition

Abstract: Why does patience vary across individuals and countries? We provide evidence on a widely-hypothesized mechanism, namely that higher longevity fosters patience. Using data on patience for 80,000 individuals in 76 countries, this paper relates exogenous variation in longevity across gender-age-country cells to variation in patience. We find that a ten-year increase in life expectancy implies a 5-percentage point higher discount factor. This relationship emerges for various sub-samples and is unaffected by other determinants including lifetime experiences regarding economic development, institutional quality, or violence. We provide a model to discuss the implications for the emergence of poverty traps.

Keywords: time preferences; mortality; poverty traps (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 J10 O10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-11-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-dem
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://rationality-and-competition.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/201.pdf (application/pdf)

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:rco:dpaper:201

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series from CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Viviana Lalli ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-24
Handle: RePEc:rco:dpaper:201