Parental influence, language and economic preferences : evidence from parent-child pair subjects

• Main Authors: Png, Gladys Kah Yee, Ngo, My Hanh, Tan, Hui Jie Stephanie
• Other Authors: He Tai-Sen
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/70336
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

While many economic studies attempt to find a correlation between parents’ and children’s economic behaviour, it is to the best of our knowledge that none have directly investigated the effects of parental influence. Moreover, although the effects of language on economic behaviour have been established, much less is known if this applies to the context of multilingual Singapore. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine both the effects of parental influence on children’s economic decisions and effects of languages on individuals’ economic decisions. As such, the Multiple Price List and Dictator Game were used to elicit time and social preferences of children and their parents respectively. The targeted children were between ages 3 to 7 years old. At the end of the experiment, parents were asked to fill up a questionnaire to gather subjects’ demographics and language usage. Based on the results from 59 pairs of parent-child subjects, we find that when parents intervene in their children’s decision-making, there is greater similarity between parents’ and children’s time preferences. This effect was not observed for social preferences. Furthermore, we found no significant language effect on children; although language had an effect on parents’ time preferences.