Economic Preferences across Generations and Family Clusters: A Large-Scale Experiment in a Developing Country

Our large-scale experiment with 542 families from rural Bangladesh finds substantial intergenerational persistence of economic preferences. Both mothers’ and fathers’ risk, time, and social preferences are significantly (and largely to the same degree) positively correlated with their children’s economic preferences, even when controlling for personality traits and socioeconomic background. We discuss possible transmission channels and are the first to classify all families into one of two clusters, with either relatively patient, risk-tolerant, and prosocial members or relatively impatient, risk averse, and spiteful members. Classifications correlate with socioeconomic background variables. We find that our results differ from evidence for rich countries.