End-of-Life Transfers and the Decision to Care for a Parent
- Presenter:
Chair: Sally Stearns; Discussant: France Priez Tue June 6, 2006 10:45-12:15 Room 326
The largest and most common transfers from parents to children take the form of investments during childhood and early adulthood, while the largest and most common transfers from children to parents occur in parents’ old age. The life-cycle structure of intergenerational transfers poses a challenge for both theoretical and empirical analysis of transfer motives. Hypothesized transfer motives fall into three broad categories: social exchange, two-sided altruism, and role-modeling or demonstration. We use the recently available data from the HRS/AHEAD on both parents’ payment for their children’s college education and children’s supply of attention and informal care during their parents’ old age to investigate the predictions of these three theories. Within-family and within-gender variation in transfers is used to distinguish among them.