The effect of language on economic behavior: Evidence from savings rates, health behaviors, and retirement assets

American Economic Review

Volumn 103, Issue 2, 2013, Pages 690-731

  Chen, M Keith ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

BEHAVIOR; ECONOMICS; FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT; FORECASTING; HEALTH BEHAVIOR; HUMAN; LANGUAGE; RETIREMENT; TIME;

BEHAVIOR; FINANCING, PERSONAL; FORECASTING; HEALTH BEHAVIOR; HUMANS; LANGUAGE; RETIREMENT; TIME;

EID: 84878556394     PISSN: 00028282     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1257/aer.103.2.690     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown.
2. Adu-Amankwah, David. 2003. Asante-Twi Learners' Reference Grammar, Madison, WI: National African Language Resource Center Press.
3. Arrow, Kenneth J., and David Levhari. 1969. "Uniqueness of the Internal Rate of Return with Variable Life of Investment." Economic Journal 79 (315): 560-66.
4. Awobuluyi, Oladele. 1978. Essentials of Yoruba Grammar, Ibadan, Nigeria: Oxford University Press.
5. Barro, Robert J., and Glenn M. MacDonald. 1979. "Social Security and Consumer Spending in an International Cross Section." Journal of Public Economics 11 (3): 275-89.
6. Börsch-Supan, Axel, and Hendrik Jürges, eds. 2005. The Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe - Methodology. Mannheim: Research Institute for the Economics of Aging.
7. Bentley, Holman. 1887. Dictionary and Grammar of the Kongo Language. London: Trubner.
8. Bittner, Maria. 2005. "Future Discourse in a Tenseless Language." Journal of Semantics 22 (4): 339-87.
9. Brown, Roger H., and Eric H. Lenneberg. 1954. "A Study in Language and Cognition." Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 49 (3): 454-62.
10. Burbidge, John B., Lonnie Magee, and A. Leslie Robb. 1988. "Alternative Transformations to Handle Extreme Values of the Dependent Variable." Journal of the American Statistical Association 83 (401): 123-27.
11. Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
12. Carrell, Patricia L. 1970. A Transformational Grammar of Igbo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
13. Chamberlain, Gary. 1980. "Analysis of Covariance with Qualitative Data." Review of Economic Studies 47 (1): 225-38.
14. Chen, M. Keith. 2013. "The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets: Dataset." American Economic Review. http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.103.2. 690.
15. Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. Paris: Mouton and Co.
16. Comrie, Bernard. 1985. Tense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
17. Copley, Bridget. 2009. The Semantics of the Future. New York: Routledge.
18. Croft, William. 2003. Typology and Universals. second ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
19. Cyffer, Norbert, Erwin Ebermann, and Georg Ziegelmeyer. 2009. Negation Patterns in West African Languages and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
20. Dahl, Östen, and Dora Kós-Dienes. 1984. Selected Working Papers from the Tense-Mood-Aspect Project. Stockholm: Institute of Linguistics, University of Stockholm.
21. Dahl, Östen. 1985. Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
22. Dahl, Östen. 2000. "The Grammar of Future Time Reference in European Languages." In Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe, edited by Östen Dahl, 309-28. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
23. Dahl, Östen, and Viveka Velupillai. 2011. "The Future Tense." In The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, edited by Matthew Dryer and Martin Haspelmath. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library. http://wals.info/chapter/67 (accessed June 1, 2011).
24. Dancygier, Barbara, and Eve Sweetser. 2009. Mental Spaces in Grammar: Conditional Constructions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
25. de Gaye, J.A. and W.S. Beecroft. 1964. Yoruba Grammar, London: Routledge.
26. Diamond, Jared. 2005. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. London: W. W. Norton and Co.
27. Emenanjo, E. Nolue. 1978. Elements of Modern Igbo Grammar, Ibadan, Nigeria: Oxford University Press.
28. Feldstein, Martin. 1980. "International Differences in Social Security and Saving." Journal of Public Economics 14 (2): 225-44.
29. Franklin, A., G. V. Drivonikou, L. Bevis, I. R. L. Davies, P. Kay, and T. Regier. 2008. "Categorical Perception of Color is Lateralized to the Right Hemisphere in Infants, but to the Left Hemisphere in Adults." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (9): 3221-25.
30. Frederick, Shane, George Loewenstein, and Ted O'Donoghue. 2002. "Time Discounting and Time Preference: A Critical Review." Journal of Economic Literature 40 (2): 351-401.
31. Harner, Lorraine. 1981. "Children Talk about the Time and Aspect of Actions." Child Development 52 (2): 498-506.
32. Hicks, John. 1973. Capital and Time. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
33. Iatridou, Sabine. 2000. "The Grammatical Ingredients of Counterfactuality." Linguistic Inquiry 31 (2): 231-70.
34. Jakobson, Roman, and Morris Halle. 1956. Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton and Company.
35. James, Deborah. 1982. "Past Tense and the Hypothetical: A Cross-Linguistic Study." Studies in Language 6 (3): 375-403.
36. Kacelnik, Alex, and Melissa Bateson. 1996. "Risk Theories - The Effects of Variance on Foraging Decisions." American Zoologist 36 (4): 402-34.
37. La Porta, Rafael, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer. 2008. "The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins." Journal of Economic Literature 46 (2): 285-332.
38. La Porta, Rafael, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert W. Vishny. 1997. "Legal Determinants of External Finance." Journal of Finance 52 (3): 1131-50.
39. Landes, David S. 1998. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are so Rich and Some so Poor. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.
40. Lehr, Marianne, James E. Redden, and Adam Balima. 1966. More, a Basic Course. Washington, DC: United States State Department, Foreign Service Institute.
41. Lewis, M. Paul, ed. 2009. "Ethnologue: Languages of the World." 16th ed. Dallas, TX: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue. com/ (accessed August 6, 2012).
42. MacLaury, Robert E., Gordon W. Hewes, Paul R. Kinnear, J. B. Deregowski, William R. Merrifield, B. A. C. Saunders, James Stanlaw, Christina Toren, J. Van Brakel, Roger W. Wescott. 1992. "From Brightness to Hue: An Explanatory Model of Color-Category Evolution." Current Anthropology 33 (2): 137-86.
43. Marschak, Jacob. 1965. "Economics of Language." Behavioral Science 10 (2): 135-40.
44. Mezhevich, Ilana. 2008. "A Time-Relational Approach to Tense and Mood." In Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, edited by Natasha Abner and Jason Bishop, 326-34. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
45. Modigliani, Franco. 1986. "Life Cycle, Individual Thrift, and the Wealth of Nations." American Economic Review 76 (3): 297-313.
46. Ndimele, Ozomekuri. 2009. "Negation Markings in Igbo." In Negation Patterns in West African Languages and Beyond, edited by Norbert Cyffer, Erwin Ebermann, and Georg Ziegelmeyer, 121-37. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
47. Newman, Paul. 2000. The Hausa Language: An Encyclopedic Reference Grammar, New Haven: Yale University Press.
48. Nurse, Derek. 2008. Tense and Aspect in Bantu. New York: Oxford University Press.
49. Olawsky, Knut J. 1999. Aspects of Dagbani Grammar: With Special Emphasis on Phonology and Morphology. Munich: LINCOM Europa.
50. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 2011. "National Accounts of OECD Countries." Washington, DC: OECD.
51. Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: William Morrow and Company.
52. Poterba, James M., ed. 1994. International Comparisons of Household Saving. National Bureau of Economic Research Project Report series. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
53. Poterba, James M., Steven F. Venti, and David A. Wise. 1995. "Do 401(k) Contributions Crowd Out Other Personal Saving?" Journal of Public Economics 58 (1): 1-32.
54. Redelmeier, Daniel A., and Daniel N. Heller. 1993. "Time Preference in Medical Decision Making and Cost-Effectiveness Analysis." Medical Decision Making 13 (3): 212-17.
55. Rubinstein, Ariel. 2000. Economics of Language. Churchill Lectures in Economic Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press.
56. Samuelson, P. A. 1937. "Some Aspects of the Pure Theory of Capital." Quarterly Journal of Economics 51: 469-96.
57. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. Course in General Linguistics. Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Translated by Roy Harris. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1983.
58. Scholz, Barbara C, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, and Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2011. "Philosophy of Linguistics." In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2011 Edition. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. http://plato. stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/linguistics/.
59. Schiffrin, Deborah. 1981. "Tense Variation in Narrative." Language 57 (1): 45-62.
60. Szagun, Gisela. 1978. "On the Frequency of Use of Tenses in English and German Children's Spontaneous Speech." Child Development 49 (3): 898-901.
61. Thieroff, Rolf. 2000. "On the Areal Distribution of Tense-Aspect Categories in Europe." In Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe, edited by Östen Dahl, 309-28. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
62. Uwalaka, Mary Angela. 1997. Igbo GramMarch Ibadan, Nigeria: The Pen Services.
63. Winawer, Jonathan, Nathan Witthoft, Michael Frank, Lisa Wu, Alex Wade, and Lera Boroditsky. 2007. "Russian Blues Reveal Effects of Language on Color Discrimination." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104 (19): 7780-85.
64. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge.
65. Woolley, Frances. 2011. "A Rant on Inverse Hyperbolic Sine Transformations." Worthwhile Canadian Initiative (blog). http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile-canadian-initi/2011/07/ a-rant-oninverse-hyperbolic-sine-transformations.html.
66. World Values Survey Association. 2009. "World Values Survey 1981-2008, Official Aggregate." v.20090901. ASEP/JDS, Madrid. www.worldvaluessurvey.org.
67. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Edited by John B. Carroll. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.