Intertemporal Choices of Children and Adults from Poor Roma Communities: A Case Study from Slovakia

ABSTRACT

Poverty may have negative consequences on people’s economic behavior and literature has documented close links between time discounting and poverty. This paper investigates intertemporal choices made by children and adults from segregated Roma communities in Slovakia. The study finds that fewer children than adults prefer smaller-sooner to larger-later amounts (referred to as “quasi-impatience”). The study further examines the decisions of individuals assigned into random teams by cohorts (children, parents, grandparents), and finds no statistically significant differences in the proportions of quasi-impatient teams across the cohorts. The results also suggest that children’s decisions are correlated with those of their parents.

KEYWORDS:

• Intertemporal choices
• impatience
• Roma
• East-Central Europe
• Slovakia

Acknowledgments

The author is very grateful for excellent feedback from the reviewers, who provided extremely useful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Other mechanisms identified by Berns, Laibson, and Loewenstein (2007) include anticipation (individuals imagine the pleasure or pain of a future event) and representation (how an individual’s brain interprets a set of choices).

2. However, other explanations beyond buying larger amounts of goods less frequently can include, e.g., earning discounts by buying greater amounts, and saving transport costs spent on travel to and from shopping centers.

3. It is important to note that the standard set-up applied in this study elicits intertemporal choices as “one-shot” tasks at a single point in time, and is not usually applied to observe the behavior of individuals across longer periods of time.

4. The design also allows me to identify participants who made time-inconsistent choices. Since the share of participants who made such choices was very small, I do not report these results.

5. Table A2 suggests that the proportion of quasi-impatient children in municipality M-2 is substantially larger than in all other municipalities. Excluding observations from M-2 and re-estimating all results yields qualitatively the same findings (some of the results become somewhat stronger), suggesting robustness of the results.

6. However, as suggested by columns 2 and 4 in Panel A of Table 6, one should not think of a standard U-shaped relationship. The pattern of the relationship is depicted in Figure A1 in the Appendix.

7. This framing differs, e.g., from the classic marshmallow experiment which measures whether young children can control their desires (Peake 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the contract No. APVV-0125-12. IRB clearance obtained from the Technical University of Košice.