Time Discounting and Wealth Inequality
利用丹麦高质量行政数据，发现个体在激励实验中的时间贴现与真实财富分布存在显著且稳定的关联，且不受教育、收入等因素影响，表明耐心通过储蓄行为影响财富不平等。
This paper documents a large association between individuals’ time discounting in incentivized experiments and their positions in the real-life wealth distribution derived from Danish high-quality administrative data for a large sample of middle-aged individuals. The association is stable over time, exists through the wealth distribution and remains large after controlling for education, income profile, school grades, initial wealth, parental wealth, credit constraints, demographics, risk preferences, and additional behavioral parameters. Our results suggest that savings behavior is a driver of the observed association between patience and wealth inequality as predicted by standard savings theory.