Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/123186 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 5532
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
According to Chen’s (2013) linguistic-savings hypothesis, languages which grammatically separate the future and the present (like English or Italian) induce less future-oriented behavior than languages in which speakers can refer to the future by using present tense (like German). We complement Chen’s approach with experimentally elicited time preference data from a bilingual city in Northern Italy. We find that German-speaking primary school children are about 46% more likely than Italian-speaking children to delay gratification in an intertemporal choice experiment. This result is robust when controlling for risk attitudes, IQ, family background, or when considering other languages.
Subjects: 
intertemporal choice
language
children
experiment
JEL: 
C91
D03
D90
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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