The impact of growth on the transmission of patience

The idea that patience is an important determinant of economic growth is well rooted in the economic literature. This paper investigates the causal relationship going in the opposite direction, i.e., from growth to patience. We propose a simple theoretical framework where patience evolves endogenously over time as a result of parental effort to transmit it to their offspring. Our model links such effort, and thus the overall level of patience in an economy, to economic growth. We corroborate our theoretical mechanism by estimating the impact of growth shocks on proxies of both patience and parental engagement to educate children to patience.