The chips are down: the influence of family on children’s trust formation

Corrado Giulietti (), Enrico Rettore and Sara Tonini ()
Additional contact information
Corrado Giulietti: University of Southampton
Sara Tonini: University of Alicante

Journal of Population Economics, 2023, vol. 36, issue 1, No 8, 233 pages

Abstract: Abstract Understanding the formation of trust is a key issue because of the impact of trust on economic performance. Earlier attempts to measure the strength of intergenerational transmission of trust relied on the cross-sectional regression of children’s trust on the contemporaneous trust of parents. In this paper, we take an original approach to the analysis of the transmission process by introducing the distinction between permanent trust (the long-lasting belief on whether one trusts people) and transient trust (capturing, e.g., random errors in the reported trust), and argue that only permanent trust is relevant for the transmission process. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we show that 2/3 of the observed variability in children’s trust is due to the transient component. The remaining variability due to the permanent component is only moderately determined by the permanent trust of the parents, with mothers being much more relevant than fathers. Focusing on the subsample of families with more than one child, we show that most of the variability in children’s permanent trust is due to unobservable family-specific features of the environment shared by siblings. We conclude that while the family environment in which children grew up determines most of their permanent trust, the direct role of intergenerational transmission is small.

Keywords: Trust; Intergenerational transmission; Cultural transmission (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00148-022-00921-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: The chips are down: The influence of family on children's trust formation (2017)
Working Paper: The Chips Are Down: The Influence of Family on Children's Trust Formation (2016)
Working Paper: The chips are down: The influence of family on children's trust formation (2016)
Working Paper: The Chips Are Down: The Influence of Family on Children's Trust Formation (2016)
Working Paper: The chips are down: The influence of family on children's trust formation (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jopoec:v:36:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1007_s00148-022-00921-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... tion/journal/148/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00148-022-00921-1

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Population Economics is currently edited by K.F. Zimmermann

More articles in Journal of Population Economics from Springer, European Society for Population Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().