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.

中文翻译：

---

时间折扣和财富不平等

本文记录了激励实验中的个人时间折扣与他们从丹麦高质量行政数据中获得的大量中年人的真实财富分布中的位置之间的巨大关联。协会随着时间的推移是稳定的，通过财富分配存在，并且在控制教育，收入状况，学校等级，初始财富，父母财富，信用约束，人口统计学，风险偏好和其他行为参数之后，仍然保持很大的关联。我们的结果表明，储蓄行为是标准储蓄理论所预测的耐心与财富不平等之间相关性的驱动因素。