On Intergenerational Transmission of Reading Habits in Italy: Is a Good Example the Best Sermon?

Abstract

The intergenerational transmission of preference and attitudes has been less investigated in the literature than the intergenerational transmission of education and income. Using the Italian Time Use Survey (2002Survey ( -2003 conducted by ISTAT, we analyse the intergenerational transmission of reading habits: are children more likely to allocate time to studying and reading when they observe their parents doing the same activity? The intergeneration transmission of attitudes towards studying and reading can be explained by both cultural and educational transmission from parents to children and by imitating behaviours. The latter channel is of particular interest, since it entails a direct influence parents may have on child's preference formation through their role model, and it opens the scope for active policies aimed at promoting good parents' behaviours. We follow two fundamental approaches to estimation: a "long run" model, consisting of OLS intergenerational type regressions for the reading habit, and "short run" household fixed effect models, where we aim at identifying the impact of the role model exerted by parents, exploiting different exposure of sibling to parents' example within the same household. Our long run results show that children are more likely to read and study when they live with parents that are used to read. Mothers seem to be more important than fathers in this type of intergenerational transmission. Moreover, the short run analysis shows that there is an imitation effect: in the day of the survey children are more likely to read after they saw either the mother or the father reading. JEL Codes: J13 J22 J24 C21Keywords: intergenerational transmission of preferences, parental role model, imitation, household fixed effectsWe would like to thank Elena Argentesi, Pedro Carneiro, Margherita Fort, Virginia Hernanz, Andrea Ichino, Cheti Nicoletti, Giulio Zanella, and the participants at the Iza/Sole 10th Transatlantic meeting, the Zew Labour Market Seminar, the ISER JESS Seminar, the EALE 2011 Conference. We acknowledge the financial and technical support from Collegio Carlo Alberto (project "Children Outcomes"). 2 1.IntroductionThe intergenerational transmission has been the object of a great deal of attention in the economic literature, mainly for its effect on mobility across generations. In fact, most of the research focused on intergenerational transmission of education and income 1 and, more recently, on the transmission of cognitive abilities 2 .Another stream of literature has studied the intergenerational transmission of preferences, habits and attitudes. Lindbeck and Nyberg (2006) analyse the transmission of norms related to work; Alvarez and Miles (2008) look at children's attitude to women work and domestic tasks while Dohmen et al. (2011) show how parents transmit to their children risk and trust attitudes.The recent development of time use data makes it possible to look at the transmission across generations of behaviours such as time use choices, a topic on which the e...

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