Data and Code for: Ancient Origins of the Global Variation in Economic Preferences

This paper shows that contemporary population-level heterogeneity in risk aversion, time preference, altruism, positive reciprocity, negative reciprocity, and trust partly traces back to the structure of the migration patterns of our very early ancestors. To document this pattern, we link differences in preferences between populations to the length of time elapsed since the ancestors of the respective groups broke apart from each other, as proxied by genetic and linguistic distance measures. Preference differences are significantly increasing in ancestral distance in both cross-country regressions and within-country analyses across groups of migrants.

本研究表明，当代人群在风险厌恶、时间偏好、利他主义、正向互惠、负向互惠以及信任维度上的群体层面异质性，部分可溯源至远古祖先的迁徙模式结构。为验证这一关联，我们将不同群体间的偏好差异，与各群体祖先彼此分化分离以来所经历的时长相挂钩，该时长以遗传距离与语言距离作为替代指标进行测算。无论是跨国回归分析，还是针对移民群体的国内范围内分析，均显示偏好差异随祖先分化距离的增大而显著上升。