Inherited Patience and the Taste for Environmental Quality

Abstract

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