Patience and subjective well-being

ABSTRACT

We show that patience is a key determinant of subjective well-being differences between countries. To address potential endogeneity bias, we apply an instrumental variable approach using the share of Protestants in the country, which prior literature has associated with patience and used as an instrument. While tentative, our findings are consistent with a sizable causal effect of patience on subjective well-being. They are robust across several specifications and hold for three different measures of subjective well-being: life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect.

KEYWORDS:

• Subjective well-being
• happiness
• time preference
• intertemporal choice
• patience

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D90
• I30

Acknowledgments

We thank Nattavudh Powdthavee and members of the Behavioural Science Group at Warwick Business School for valuable comments on earlier versions of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data, analysis script, and description of variables are available on an OSF repository: https://osf.io/5ay4j/