{"title":"Hunger for money: Early-life hunger experiences increase individual's desire for money","authors":"Xin Huang , Zhiyi Li","doi":"10.1016/j.socec.2025.102335","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The desire for money is one of the strongest motivations for individuals in contemporary society. This paper focuses on the stimuli for such motivation, specifically examining the impact of individuals’ early-life hunger experiences on their desire for money. Utilizing a large survey sample extracted from the China Family Panel Studies, we find that early-life hunger experiences lead to a significant increase in individuals’ desire for money. Further analyses reveal that heterogeneous effects exist across personal characteristics, including gender, hukou, and personal income level. Moreover, we find that the hunger experience effect shows a monotonically decreasing relationship with exposure age. This paper complements the existing literature on stimuli for money desire and proposes a potential mediator for why past hunger/famine experiences induce money-oriented behaviors in sufferers’ later life, as frequently reported by previous literature.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51637,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics","volume":"115 ","pages":"Article 102335"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6000,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214804325000023","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The desire for money is one of the strongest motivations for individuals in contemporary society. This paper focuses on the stimuli for such motivation, specifically examining the impact of individuals’ early-life hunger experiences on their desire for money. Utilizing a large survey sample extracted from the China Family Panel Studies, we find that early-life hunger experiences lead to a significant increase in individuals’ desire for money. Further analyses reveal that heterogeneous effects exist across personal characteristics, including gender, hukou, and personal income level. Moreover, we find that the hunger experience effect shows a monotonically decreasing relationship with exposure age. This paper complements the existing literature on stimuli for money desire and proposes a potential mediator for why past hunger/famine experiences induce money-oriented behaviors in sufferers’ later life, as frequently reported by previous literature.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly the Journal of Socio-Economics) welcomes submissions that deal with various economic topics but also involve issues that are related to other social sciences, especially psychology, or use experimental methods of inquiry. Thus, contributions in behavioral economics, experimental economics, economic psychology, and judgment and decision making are especially welcome. The journal is open to different research methodologies, as long as they are relevant to the topic and employed rigorously. Possible methodologies include, for example, experiments, surveys, empirical work, theoretical models, meta-analyses, case studies, and simulation-based analyses. Literature reviews that integrate findings from many studies are also welcome, but they should synthesize the literature in a useful manner and provide substantial contribution beyond what the reader could get by simply reading the abstracts of the cited papers. In empirical work, it is important that the results are not only statistically significant but also economically significant. A high contribution-to-length ratio is expected from published articles and therefore papers should not be unnecessarily long, and short articles are welcome. Articles should be written in a manner that is intelligible to our generalist readership. Book reviews are generally solicited but occasionally unsolicited reviews will also be published. Contact the Book Review Editor for related inquiries.