Ancient Origins of the Global Variation in Economic Preferences

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 difference...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:AEA papers and proceedings 2020-05, Vol.110, p.319-323
Main Authors: Becker, Anke, Enke, Benjamin, Falk, Armin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
THE ROLE OF ATTITUDES AND PERCEPTIONS ON ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL OUTCOMES
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2574-0768
2574-0776
DOI:10.1257/pandp.20201071