Patience and long-run growth

Complementing research on the effect of patience on individual behavior, we present empirical evidence that patience is an important determinant of long-run income differences between countries. To account for a potential endogeneity bias, we instrument patience by information on how languages spoken in the countries of our sample require speakers to encode time. The economic impact of patience and growth is sizable. Our results suggest that increasing patience by one standard deviation raises per-capita income by between 34% and 78%.