Time: 15:30-17:00, December 10, 2019 (Tuesday)

Venue: 1620, Rear Main Building, Beijing Normal University

Speaker：Klaus Zimmermann（Global Labor Organization (GLO), UNU-MERIT and Maastricht University）

Topic：Economic Preferences Across Generations

Abstract：Economic preferences – like time, risk and social preferences – have been shown to be very influential for real-life outcomes, such as educational achievements, labor market outcomes, or health status. We contribute to the recent literature that has examined how and when economic preferences are formed and give particular emphasis on the role of intergenerational transmission of economic preferences within families in Bangladesh. Our paper is the first to run incentivized experiments with fathers and mothers and their children by drawing on a unique dataset of 1,999 members of Bangladeshi families, including 911 children, aged 6-17 years, and 544 pairs of mothers and fathers. We find a large degree of intergenerational persistence as the economic preferences of mothers and fathers are significantly positively related to their children’s economic preferences. Importantly, we find that socio-economic status of a family has no explanatory power as soon as we control for parents’ economic preferences. A series of robustness checks deals with the role of older siblings, the similarity of parental preferences, and the average preferences within a child’s village. We can also classify whole families into one of two clusters with either relatively patient, risk-tolerant and pro-social members or relatively impatient, risk averse and spiteful members – and show that socio-economic background variables can explain whether a family belongs to the one or the other cluster.

About the Speaker

Mr. Klaus Zimmermann is Co-Director of POP at UNU-MERIT; Full Professor of Economics at Bonn University (em.); Honorary Professor, Maastricht University, Free University of Berlin and Renmin University of China; Member, German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Regional Science Academy, and Academia Europaea; Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Population Economics. In Spring 2019, he has been the George Soros Visiting Professor, School of Public Policy, Central European University (CEU), Budapest. Among others, he has worked before at the Universities of Melbourne, Princeton, Harvard, Bonn, Munich, Kyoto, Mannheim, Dartmouth College and University of Pennsylvania. He has published widely in top academic journals, is committed to the diffusion of research to policy and society, writes regularly in leading international media and advises governments and institutions.