Parental paternalism and patience

Abstract

Quantitative evidence on the extent of paternalism within families is scant. We provide a novel measure to study whether and how parents interfere paternalistically in their children’s intertemporal decision-making. In an experiment with over 2000 members from 610 families in Bangladesh, we find that more than half of all parents are willing to pay money to override their children’s choices in order to mitigate the (correctly anticipated) level of children’s present bias. The extent of parental paternalism is strongly related to parenting styles and we discuss how it interacts with the intergenerational transmission of patience. Show more