Transition to Parent-Child Coresidence: Parental Needs and the Strategic Bequest Motive

The strategic bequest motive implies that children may want to live with their parents and provide care for them with the expectation of inheriting a larger portion of their bequest. This paper examines this hypothesis by focusing on the transition to coresidence by elderly Japanese parents and their children using underutilized Japanese panel data. Unlike previous studies, evidence for the bequest motive is generally tenuous. In addition, our use of a two-component mixture logit model identifies the minority group of families that follows the bequest motive and the majority group that does not.