Spousal influence and assortative mating on time preferences: a field experiment in the USA

Households make economic tradeoffs over time. We seek to understand how a spouse’s individual time preference influences joint household decisions. We conduct a field experiment with 94 pairs of couples in the United States. Each subject makes a series of choices between payoffs received at two diff...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inReview of economics of the household Vol. 18; no. 2; pp. 461 - 512
Main Authors Gnagey, Matthew, Grijalva, Therese, Rong, Rong
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York Springer US 01.06.2020
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Age differences
Assortative mating
Bargaining
Consumption
Couples
Decision making
Developing countries
Economic analysis
Economics
Economics and Finance
Education
Experiments
Gender
Homogamy
Households
Husbands
Income
Influence
Labor Economics
Labor market
LDCs
Marriage
Married couples
Mating
Microeconomics
Patience
Population Economics
Power
Preferences
Savings
Social Sciences
Socialization
Spouses
Time
Tolerance
Wives
United States > US
D10
Spousal influence
Time preference
Intra-household decision making
C93
Convex time budget
D91
Field experiment
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Summary:Households make economic tradeoffs over time. We seek to understand how a spouse’s individual time preference influences joint household decisions. We conduct a field experiment with 94 pairs of couples in the United States. Each subject makes a series of choices between payoffs received at two different times for oneself and then jointly with their spouse as a household. Results from our sample indicate that husbands do not have more influence than their wives do on the joint decision. This finding differs from previous conclusions drawn from data collected in developing countries. We further find that differences in education, age, and earned income do not provide spouses with additional bargaining power. However, the relative power shifts based on individual preferences related to patience, savings, risk tolerance, and which spouse controls the household income. Lastly, our data supports assortative mating based on time preferences, but we do not find evidence supportive of spousal socialization, spousal selection, or changing matching patterns on time preferences.
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ISSN:1569-5239
1573-7152
DOI:10.1007/s11150-019-09466-x