Half of parents, their children impatient for social preferences

More than half of the country's parents and their children are impatient for social preferences which also shape their economic predilections, according to a study.
It also found that two?thirds of the parents and children are also willing to take some degree of risks that ultimately help them fare in an economically positive way.
A report on the study titled "Economic Preferences Across Generations and Family Clusters: A Large-Scale Experiment in a Developing Country" was revealed at a seminar, organised by the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) in the city on Tuesday.
Professor Shyamal Chowdhury, School of Economics, University of Sydney, Professor Matthias Sutter, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Bonn and Professor Klaus F Zimmermann, Maastricht University, jointly conducted the research.
Dr Chowdhury presented the study report which has recently been selected for publication in the Journal of Political Economy of University of Chicago.
The research was done through an experiment with 542 families drawn from four districts in Bangladesh, where they elicited economic preferences of 542 pairs of husbands and wives, and of their 907 children, yielding a total of 1,991 individuals as experimental participants.
Dr Chowdhury said the research team preferred to have started with an overview of economic preferences of parents and children based on their experimental data.
He said economic preferences such as risk, time and social preferences are important for a large set of outcomes in life.
Since preferences are often assumed to be largely shaped in childhood, the transmission of preferences from parents to children has received ever increasing attention, he said.
In terms of social preferences, the study found nearly 10 per cent of the parents and children are altruistic, less than 10 per cent of the mothers and more than 20 per cent of the fathers are egalitarian, and about 17 per cent children are egalitarian.
It also found that women in the research areas were more selfish than that of men in the social preference context.
Dr Chowdhury claimed that none of the previous papers had focused on how different domains of a subject's economic preferences relate to each other.
"Moreover, no study has ever looked at whether it is possible to identify types of whole families with respect to a set of economic preferences," he said.
"Besides the experimental elicitation of economic preferences, they have a rich set of additional controls, such as personality traits, and socio?demographic background data," he added.
BIDS research director Monzur Hossain, among others, also spoke at the seminar.

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