As part of our recent study on Cross-country relationships between life expectancy, intertemporal choice and age at first birth, my colleague Adam Bulley and I used data from the International Test of Risk Attitudes (INTRA) survey, by Wang, Rieger & Hens (2015), which measured intertemporal choice 53 countries. We explored the cross-country relationships between average life expectancy, intertemporal choice, and women’s age at first birth across the 46 countries for which full data were available. We found that, across countries, lower life expectancy is associated with a smaller percentage of people willing to wait for a larger delayed reward, and a younger average age at first birth: a result that mirrors findings from studies at the individual level.

In the process of our analysis, we found that bar charts comparing countries made little intuitive sense. So, we experimented with mapping the data instead. As a result, we’ve made our maps of life expectancy, intertemporal choice, and ages at first birth available online, as a supplement to the paper. Such maps are easy to create and publish, using Google Fusion Tables (see my previous blog post), and provide a nice way for readers to explore the data.

The raw data can be found as a supplement to our paper [link here] or by clicking on the source link in each individual map below (doing this will open a Fusion Table containing the source data).

Life expectancy map:

Intertemporal choice map:

Ages at first birth: