Publications
Publications
- May 2020
- AEA Papers and Proceedings
Ancient Origins of the Global Variation in Economic Preferences
By: Anke Becker, Benjamin Enke and Armin Falk
Abstract
This paper shows that contemporary population-level heterogeneity in risk aversion, time preference, altruism, positive reciprocity, negative reciprocity, and trust partly traces back to the structure of the migration patterns of our very early ancestors. To document this pattern, we link differences in preferences between populations to the length of time elapsed since the ancestors of the respective groups broke apart from each other, as proxied by genetic and linguistic distance measures. Preference differences are significantly increasing in ancestral distance in both cross-country regressions and within-country analyses across groups of migrants.
Keywords
Migration Patterns; Behavioral Economics; Preferences; Microeconomics; Demography; Decision Making; Risk and Uncertainty; History; Global Range
Citation
Becker, Anke, Benjamin Enke, and Armin Falk. "Ancient Origins of the Global Variation in Economic Preferences." AEA Papers and Proceedings 110 (May 2020): 319–323.
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