Human Capital and the Lifetime Costs of Impatience

Abstract

Note: The dependent variable reported in regression results uses the opposite of this variable, i.e. "No regular high school diploma by age 21".

Nudging in education

“…their patient counterparts (Cadena & Keys, 2015). Parents, who are an important influence on early-life education decisions, could potentially compensate for their children's poor self-control.…”

The labor market consequences of impatience

“…Typical choices include friendly/interested, cooperative, impatient/restless/bored, and hostile. Several studies have found that survey respondents rated as "impatient" by their interviewer behave in ways suggesting a difficulty with delaying gratification [1], [8]. The roughly 10-15% of individuals coded this way are more likely to smoke, less likely to have a bank account, more likely to drink to excess, and more likely to leave military service prior to the end of their initial commitments [1].…”

“…Another study uses the interviewer rating method discussed above to examine directly how impatience affects the high school dropout decision [1]. The key result is that impatient individuals are 56% more likely to drop out of high school than are patient individuals with similar characteristics.…”

“…That same study then tracks individuals who complete high school to see how impatience affects investment in college [1]. The study is especially interested in "preference reversals," which are the hallmark of dynamic inconsistency.…”

Does patience matter in marriage stability? Some evidence from Italy

“…A large number of empirical and experimental works confirms the relevance of inter-temporal and risk preferences for a very large number of domains such as education, (Belzil and Leonardi, 2007;Caner and Okten, 2010;Castillo et al 2011;Cadena and Keys, 2011;De Paola andGioia, 2012, 2013), labour market outcomes (Della Vigna and Paserman, 2005;Drago, 2006;Ahn, 2010;Dohmen and Falk, 2011;Pollmann et al 2012), health (Sutter et al, 2011;Golsteyn et al, 2012), immigration (Jaeger et al, 2010). Much less studied is the role of these variables on marriage, divorce and fertility.…”