IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/mpg/wpaper/2025_10.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Spatial patterns in the formation of economic preferences

Author

Listed:
  • Shyamal Chowdhury

    (Australian National University)

  • Manuela Puente Beccar

    (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn)

  • Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch

    (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn)

  • Sebastian O. Schneider

    (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn)

  • Matthias Sutter

    (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn)

Abstract

We investigate how strongly the local environment beyond the family can contribute to understanding the formation of children’s economic preferences. Building on precise geolocation data for around 6000 children, we use fixed effects, spatial autoregressive models and Kriging to capture the relation between the local environment and children’s preferences. The spatial models explain a considerable part of so far unexplained variation in preferences. Moreover, the “spatial stability†of preferences exceeds the village level. Our results highlight the importance of the local environment for the formation of children’s preferences, which we quantify to be as large as that of parental preferences.

Suggested Citation

  • Shyamal Chowdhury & Manuela Puente Beccar & Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch & Sebastian O. Schneider & Matthias Sutter, 2025. "Spatial patterns in the formation of economic preferences," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods 2025_10, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.
    • Handle: RePEc:mpg:wpaper:2025_10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.coll.mpg.de/pdf_dat/2025_10online.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    skill formation; spatial models; kriging; local environment; patience; risk attitudes; prosociality; experiments with children; Bangladesh;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D01 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Microeconomic Behavior: Underlying Principles
    • C21 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Cross-Sectional Models; Spatial Models; Treatment Effect Models
    • C99 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Other

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mpg:wpaper:2025_10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Marc Martin (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/mppggde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.