CeDEx workshop - Matthias Sutter (University of Innsbruck)

Time preferences in children - Age and language effects

Matthias Sutter, Silvia Angerer, Daniela Glätzle-Rützler and Philipp Lergetporer

Abstract:

We examine intertemporal preferences of more than 1100 elementary school children, aged 6 to 11 years, in an incentivized experiment. The experiment was run in all elementary schools in Meran, a town in South Tyrol with an equal fraction of German and Italian speaking citizens. Besides studying age effects, we investigate differences in impatience between language groups, an issue that has caught attention recently. Our design comprises three binary choices between a fixed payment today and a delayed payment where stake sizes of the latter are increased over treatments. Our findings suggest that subjects among all age groups exhibit more patience as stake sizes for waiting are increased. Furthermore, the subjects? willingness to delay gratification increases with age. Most importantly, we show that children from Italian speaking schools are significantly less patient. This result is prevalent among all age groups, indicating a considerable impact of language on patience.