Fabian Kosse

Impatience Among Preschool Children and Their Mothers

Using experimental data of children and their mothers, this paper explores the intergenerational relationship of impatience. The childs impatience stems from a delay of gratification experiment. Mothers impatience has been assessed by a choice task where the mothers faced trade-offs between a smaller-sooner and a larger-later monetary reward with a delay of six or twelve months. The findings demonstrate an intergenerational relationship in short-run decision making. Controlling for mothers and childs characteristics the childs impatience at preschool age is significantly correlated with the six month maternal reservation interest rate.

Quasi-Hyperbolic Time Preferences and Their Intergenerational Transmission

This study explores the intergenerational transmission of time preferences and focuses on the question which specific aspects of mother’s time preference are related to her preschool child’s ability to delay gratification. We provide a new procedure for assessing the parameters of a “quasi-hyperbolic” discount function (Laibson, 1997) using two trade-off experiments. We apply the procedure to a sample of 213 mother-child pairs and show that especially mother’s beta parameter is related to her preschool child’s ability to delay gratification.

The Nutritional and Social Environment-Related Effects of Breastfeeding on Intelligence.

The Nutritional and Social Environment-Related Effects of Breastfeeding on Intelligence While various studies document a positive association between duration of breastfeeding and the child’s intelligence, there is an ongoing discussion about the mechanisms behind that association.1,2 The usual approach to distinguish between nutritional and confounding environment-related effects is to control for observable environmental factors in the analysis. Varying availability and measures of control variables make comparisons across studies difficult and lead to different results concerning the partial correlation between duration of breastfeeding and intelligence.1,2 This study provides a new empirical test of the purely nutritional effect of breastfeeding on the child’s intelligence and does not rely on the availability of control variables.