Inherited Patience and the Taste for Environmental Quality

Environmental-quality and environmental-protection actions vary worldwide. Investing in environmental quality often involves intertemporal trade-offs, with present costs future rewards. A growing body of literature finds that patience, a measure time preference, is positively associated pro-environmental policies, attitudes, behaviors. However, much this work relies on contemporaneous measures patience may be jointly determined thus give rise to spurious correlations, calling the validity these results into question. This paper contributes discussion determinants by addressing methodological concern. We propose an individual form inherited cultural values, which derived from information countries origin individual’s parents. argue inherited-patience plausibly exogenous event life. Using measure, we find strong, positive relationship between concern for environment. Our are robust inclusion variables reflecting demographic socioeconomic status, religious identity, trust, political ideology, location, as well period country fixed effects.