The chips are down: the influence of family on children's trust formation
The chips are down: the influence of family on children's trust formation
Understanding the formation of trust is a key issue because of the impact of trust on economic performance. Earlier attempts to measure the strength of intergenerational transmission of trust relied on the cross-sectional regression of children's trust on the contemporaneous trust of parents. In this paper, we take an original approach to the analysis of the transmission process by introducing the distinction between permanent trust (the long-lasting belief on whether one trusts people) and transient trust (capturing, e.g., random errors in the reported trust), and argue that only permanent trust is relevant for the transmission process. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we show that 2/3 of the observed variability in children's trust is due to the transient component. The remaining variability due to the permanent component is only moderately determined by the permanent trust of the parents, with mothers being much more relevant than fathers. Focusing on the subsample of families with more than one child, we show that most of the variability in children's permanent trust is due to unobservable family-specific features of the environment shared by siblings. We conclude that while the family environment in which children grew up determines most of their permanent trust, the direct role of intergenerational transmission is small.
Cultural transmission, Intergenerational transmission, Trust
211-233
Giulietti, Corrado
c662221c-fad3-4456-bfe3-78f8a5211158
Rettore, Enrico
2e193b0f-236f-450e-b13a-b49e654fa8c1
Tonini, Sara
7e9048fc-78b9-449c-a04d-10e8e91a6395
January 2023
Giulietti, Corrado
c662221c-fad3-4456-bfe3-78f8a5211158
Rettore, Enrico
2e193b0f-236f-450e-b13a-b49e654fa8c1
Tonini, Sara
7e9048fc-78b9-449c-a04d-10e8e91a6395
Giulietti, Corrado, Rettore, Enrico and Tonini, Sara
(2023)
The chips are down: the influence of family on children's trust formation.
Journal of Population Economics, 36 (1), .
(doi:10.1007/s00148-022-00921-1).
Abstract
Understanding the formation of trust is a key issue because of the impact of trust on economic performance. Earlier attempts to measure the strength of intergenerational transmission of trust relied on the cross-sectional regression of children's trust on the contemporaneous trust of parents. In this paper, we take an original approach to the analysis of the transmission process by introducing the distinction between permanent trust (the long-lasting belief on whether one trusts people) and transient trust (capturing, e.g., random errors in the reported trust), and argue that only permanent trust is relevant for the transmission process. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we show that 2/3 of the observed variability in children's trust is due to the transient component. The remaining variability due to the permanent component is only moderately determined by the permanent trust of the parents, with mothers being much more relevant than fathers. Focusing on the subsample of families with more than one child, we show that most of the variability in children's permanent trust is due to unobservable family-specific features of the environment shared by siblings. We conclude that while the family environment in which children grew up determines most of their permanent trust, the direct role of intergenerational transmission is small.
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intergenerational_trust_formation
- Accepted Manuscript
Text
s00148-022-00921-1
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Accepted/In Press date: 25 August 2022
e-pub ahead of print date: 17 September 2022
Published date: January 2023
Additional Information:
Funding Information:
We thank Armin Falk and participants at seminars at IZA, Southampton, FBK-IRVAPP, Cape Town, Bologna, CESIfo, Torino; and at the 19th IZA European Summer School in Labor Economics, the 2016 European Public Choice Society in Freiburg, the 2016 SOEP User Conference, the ESEM 2016 in Geneve for their inspiring comments, and editor Shuaizhang Feng and two anonymous reviewers.
Funding Information:
Sara Tonini kindly acknowledges the financial support by the Fondazione Universitá di Trento under the Dematté grant.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s).
Keywords:
Cultural transmission, Intergenerational transmission, Trust
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 470446
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/470446
ISSN: 0933-1433
PURE UUID: 0fddc0f2-7e79-438c-82e2-dd5a76518114
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Date deposited: 11 Oct 2022 16:33
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 03:05
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Author:
Enrico Rettore
Author:
Sara Tonini
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