Data and Code for: Ancient Origins of the Global Variation in Economic Preferences

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Armin Falk, University of Bonn and briq institute; Benjamin Enke, Harvard University. Department of Economics; Anke Becker, Harvard University. Harvard Business School. Division of Research

Version: View help for Version V1

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
Country.dta	application/x-stata	1.6 MB	08/28/2020 01:06:PM
Panel_A_Country.do	text/x-stata-syntax	469 bytes	08/28/2020 01:07:PM
Panel_B_Migrant.do	text/x-stata-syntax	598 bytes	01/05/2020 03:58:PM
Readme.docx	application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document	12.8 KB	08/28/2020 01:06:PM
Readme.pdf	application/pdf	48.6 KB	10/12/2020 09:02:AM
Within.dta	application/x-stata	3.6 MB	01/05/2020 04:05:PM

Project Citation:

Falk, Armin, Enke, Benjamin, and Becker, Anke. Data and Code for: Ancient Origins of the Global Variation in Economic Preferences. Nashville, TN: American Economic Association [publisher], 2020. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2020-10-12. https://doi.org/10.3886/E120836V1

Project Description

Summary: This paper shows that contemporary population-level heterogeneity in risk aversion, time preference, altruism, positive reciprocity, negative reciprocity, and trust partly traces back to the structure of the migration patterns of our very early ancestors. To document this pattern, we link differences in preferences between populations to the length of time elapsed since the ancestors of the respective groups broke apart from each other, as proxied by genetic and linguistic distance measures. Preference differences are significantly increasing in ancestral distance in both cross-country regressions and within-country analyses across groups of migrants.

Scope of Project

JEL Classification:
      D64 Altruism; Philanthropy; Intergenerational Transfers
      D81 Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
      D91 Micro-Based Behavioral Economics: Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
      Z13 Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification

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V1 [2020-10-12]

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