The Effect of Education on Patience

We provide evidence on the effect of education on patience from the analysis of 49 compulsory schooling reforms in 48 countries around the globe. To this end, we combine data from the Global Preferences Survey (GPS) on patience of respondents living in these countries with data that we constructed based on available information on compulsory schooling laws that were implemented between 1947 and 2003 in the countries covered by the GPS. Using within country variation in compulsory years of schooling we find that being subject to a compulsory schooling reform increases patience by approximately 0.09 standard deviations. Assuming that the reforms satisfy the exclusion restriction, we then estimate the causal relationship between years of education and patience. We find that an additional year of education induced by the reforms increases schooling by more than 0.1 standard deviations. However, the effect is not homogeneous across reforms. The effect is almost exclusively driven by reforms that target a higher level of secondary education.

Joint work with Radost Holler and Uwe Sunde