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The Intergenerational Transmission of Attitudes: Analyzing Time Preferences and Reciprocity

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Abstract

The present research adds to the question on intergenerational correlation of attitudes between parents and children. So far, it is not clear whether the transmission process is purely genetic or whether parents take an active role in socializing their children. The transmission of time preferences and reciprocity is analyzed by focusing on three aspects: (1) direct transmission from parents to children; (2) the impact of prevailling attitudes in children’s surrounding environment; (3) parents’ positive assortative mating. The findings support all three channels. Differences in the size of the intergenerational correlation according to family or parental characteristics suggest that the process is not purely genetic. The present analysis is of even greater importance, as the analyzed attitudes determine economic success sustainably.

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Notes

  1. Paternalism captures the extent to which parents disagree with the natural preferences of their children and try to interfere with their own choices (Zilibotti and Doepke 2014).

  2. Version 29, SOEP, 2013, doi:10.5684/soep.v29.

  3. There was no information on all these attitudes for all of the individuals, as some individuals who where interviewed in 2008 did not answer some of the questions in 2010 and vice versa. Summing up, there were 2395 observations for patience and 2394 for impulsiveness. Furthermore there were 2246 observations for positive and 2221 observations for negative reciprocity, for children and both of their parents.

  4. German and English versions of the questionnaires are available at www.diw.de.

  5. The six items were based on the measure developed by Perugini et al. (2003) which consists of 27 items, measuring reciprocity as well as beliefs on reciprocity. A shortened version with the six items mentioned above was used in the main SOEP survey.

  6. Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient was used as the attitudes were measured on an ordinal scale (Conover 1995, p. 245).

  7. No alternative estimation techniques were used as Dohmen et al. (2012) showed in their analysis of intergenerational correlation that results from OLS estimations were robust to using other estimation techniques such as IV regression or using a binary measure as the dependent variable.

  8. For all subsequent analysis, further results on the regressions including only father’s or mother’s attitude are available upon request.

  9. Those variables have been found to determine not only patience, but also positive and negative reciprocity (see e.g., Dohmen et al. 2008; Vischer et al. 2013) and were therefore included in all following analysis.

  10. On a scale ranking from 0—“risk averse” to 10—“fully prepared to take risks” individuals had to assess whether they are fully prepared to take risks or try to avoid them. Validity for the use of the general risk question was given by Dohmen et al. (2011) who showed that responses to this question were good predictions of the actual risk behavior of individuals in a lottery experiment.

  11. There were several missing observation for years of schooling in the data set. To avoid dropping these observations, all missings were replaced with the mean of the schooling-variable and an indicator for missing schooling information was included. Additionally, (unreported) specifications included indicator variables for school-leaving degree (upper secondary or technical school degree, intermediate school degree, secondary school degree, dropout, missing) instead of years of schooling. The results were qualitatively and quantitatively similar.

  12. The SOEP included information on the households’ region of residence on the level of the spatial planning regions (in German: Raumordnungsregionen, ROR). Germany was divided into 97 spatial planning regions, which were defined by the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning. Thus, it was possible to add variables that indicated in which of these regions survey participants lived at the time of the interview in the analysis (for more detailed information see Knies and Spiess 2007).

  13. The measure of trust came from three questions from the 2008 wave of the SOEP which were combined into a single item measuring generalized trust (Richter et al. 2013). In the original three questions individuals had to state their agreement on general trust, reliance on others, and need for caution in dealing with strangers using a four-point scale (1-“Agree completely”—4 -“Disagree completely”).

  14. For an overview on measurement errors see Greene (2012).

  15. Detailed results available upon request.

  16. The aggregation of the attitudes on the regional level has to be treated carefully, as one has to keep in mind that the SOEP data should not be taken as representative of the whole regional population (Knies and Spiess 2007).

  17. The results for those regressions are available upon request.

  18. The SOEP included two questions on whether one had arguments or fights with the mother or father at age 15. The five answering categories range from “very often” to “never”. If children indicated that they fought “sometimes”, “seldom”, or “never” with one of their parents during their childhood, the relationship was seen as harmonic. If children indicated that they fought “often” or “very often”, the relationship was called “Fights” in Part 9-4.

  19. Overall life satisfaction was measured with a single item, where individuals had to indicate on a scale from 0 to 10 whether they are completely dissatisfied or completely satisfied. When mother’s or father’s life satisfaction was above the average satisfaction of all parents in the sample, it was seen as “High”, otherwise as “Low” in Table 9.

  20. According to Stock and Watson (2007) the F-test for a single endogenous regressor should be above 10, otherwise the instruments are assumed to be weak.

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  1. Department of Survey Design and Methodology, GESIS—Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, P.O. Box 12 21 55, 68072, Mannheim, Germany

    Britta Gauly

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Gauly, B. The Intergenerational Transmission of Attitudes: Analyzing Time Preferences and Reciprocity. J Fam Econ Iss 38, 293–312 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-016-9513-4

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