Aides aux parents âgés et allocation intra-familiale

In this paper, we examine how children care for their elderly parents and the motives of these family transfers, accounting for interactions between parents and their different children. We study a theoretical model of intergenerational transfers based on altruism, where siblings care for their parents (a public good). Decisions of upstream assistance are analysed using data from a trigenerational survey.Econometric results, which control for unobserved heterogeneity within families using fixed effects, show that time-related transfers to elders mainly depend on the parental needs and the children’s availability. Transfer behaviors from children are rather independent from each other: there does not exist any positive or negative competition within siblings when caring for elderly.