Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/159631 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
Quaderni - Working Paper DSE No. 792
Publisher: 
Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche (DSE), Bologna
Abstract: 
We use the last two waves of the Italian Time Use Survey to analyse the intergenerational transmission of reading habits. This can be explained by both cultural and educational transfers from parents to children and by imitative behaviour. Imitation is of particular interest, since it suggests the direct influence parents can have on a child's preference and habit formation, and opens the way for active policies promoting good parenting behaviour. We investigate the imitative behaviour of children using a household fixed-effects model, where we identify the impact of the parents' role by exploiting the different exposure of siblings to parents' example within the same household. We find robust evidence on the existence of an imitation effect: on the day of the survey children are more likely to read after seeing either the mother or the father reading.
JEL: 
J13
J22
J24
C21
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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