Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/232782 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 14030
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
We study whether and how parents interfere paternalistically in their children's intertemporal decision-making. Based on experiments with over 2,000 members of 610 families, we find that parents anticipate their children's present bias and aim to mitigate it. Using a novel method to measure parental interference, we show that more than half of all parents are willing to pay money to override their children's choices. Parental interference predicts more intensive parenting styles and a lower intergenerational transmission of patience. The latter is driven by interfering parents not transmitting their own present bias, but molding their children's preferences towards more time-consistent choices.
Subjects: 
parental paternalism
time preferences
convex time budgets
present bias
intergenerational transmission
parenting styles
experiment
JEL: 
C90
D1
D91
D64
J13
J24
O12
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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