A model of ideological transmission with endogenous parental preferences
Résumé
Under what conditions can a given trait, such as religion or language, be preserved in the long run? To answer this question I develop a dynamic framework of ideological transmission in families in which parents are biased towards children’s traits and socioeconomic activities are modeled in the shape of a trust-matching process. I model how children are educated to a specific ideological trait that later in life will influence the well-being of the family. Compared to the existing literature, my model yields two new results. First, paternalistic preferences in children’s education at time t are a necessary but not a sufficient condition to ensure the preservation of heterogeneity in the long-run distribution of traits. Second, my model is able to reproduce historical events in which a reversal of parents’ evaluation of traits has been observed. Assuming myopic agents does not change the qualitative results of the model.