IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rco/dpaper/108.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Effects of Poverty On Impatience

Author

Listed:
  • Bartos, Vojtech

    (LMU Munich)

  • Bauer, Michal

    (CERGE-EI and Institute of Economic Studies)

  • Chytilova, Julie

    (Institute of Economic Studies)

  • Levely, Ian

    (Wageningen University)

Abstract

We study two psychological channels how poverty may increase impatient behavior -- an effect on time preference and reduced attention. We measured discount rates among Ugandan farmers who made decisions about when to enjoy entertainment instead of working. We find that experimentally induced thoughts about poverty-related problems increase the preference to consume entertainment early and delay work. The effect is equivalent to a 27 p.p. increase in the intertemporal rate of substitution. Using monitoring tools similar to eye tracking, a novel feature for this subject pool, we show this effect is not due to a lower ability to sustain attention.

Suggested Citation

  • Bartos, Vojtech & Bauer, Michal & Chytilova, Julie & Levely, Ian, 2018. "Effects of Poverty On Impatience," Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series 108, CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition.
    • Handle: RePEc:rco:dpaper:108
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://rationality-and-competition.de/wp-content/uploads/discussion_paper/108.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mika Akesaka & Peter Eibich & Chie Hanaoka & Hitoshi Shigeoka, 2023. "Temporal Instability of Risk Preference among the Poor: Evidence from Payday Cycles," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 15(4), pages 68-99, October.
    2. Schmitt, Stefanie Yvonne & Schlatterer, Markus G., 2020. "Poverty and limited attention," BERG Working Paper Series 159, Bamberg University, Bamberg Economic Research Group.
    3. Dietmar Fehr & Günther Fink & Kelsey Jack, 2019. "Poverty, Seasonal Scarcity and Exchange Asymmetries," NBER Working Papers 26357, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Delis, Manthos & Galariotis, Emilios & Monne, Jerome, 2021. "Financial vulnerability and seeking expert advice: Evidence from a survey experiment," MPRA Paper 107095, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Sequeira, Sandra & Banerjee, Abhijit, 2020. "Spatial Mismatches and Imperfect Information in the Job Search," CEPR Discussion Papers 14414, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    6. Banker, Sachin & Bhanot, Syon P. & Deshpande, Aishwarya, 2020. "Poverty identity and preference for challenge: Evidence from the U.S. and India," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 76(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    poverty; scarcity; time discounting; preferences; inattention; decision-making process;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rco:dpaper:108. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Viviana Lalli (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://rationality-and-competition.de .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.