Aging populations in developing countries have spurred the introduction of public pension programs to preserve the standard of living for the elderly. The often-overlooked mechanism of intergenerational transfers, however, can dampen these intended policy effects, as adult children who make...

Precipitated by rapid globalization, rising inequality, population growth, and longevity gains, social protection programs have been on the rise in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in the last three decades. However, the introduction of public benefits could displace informal mechanisms...

This paper contributes to the literature on old employment barriers by exploring empirically the relative importance of mental v.s. physical health in determining work. It combines regression and variance decomposition analyses to quantify the respective role of mental v.s. physical health. The...

Shocks to health have been shown to reduce labour supply for the individual affected. Less is known about household self-insurance through a partner's response to a health shock. Previous studies have presented inconclusive empirical evidence on the existence of a healthrelated 'added worker...

We analyse how the financial support for long-term elderly care affects the household’s propensity to save. Using the difference-in-differences estimator, we investigate the 2002 Scottish reform, which introduced free formal personal care for all the Scottish elderly aged 65 and above. We find...

In this paper, we test the conventional wisdom in developing countries of ‘more children, more happiness’ by exploiting the cohort and provincial variations of elderly parents exposed to the one-child policy in China. Using nationally representative survey data from the 2015 China Health and...

We study the retirement effects on mental health using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design based on the eligibility age to the state pension in the Netherlands. We find that the mental effects are heterogeneous by gender and marital status. Retirement of partnered men positively affects...

China still lags behind Europe along the path of the demographic transition and therefore is still much younger. However, due to the speed with which the fertility rate dropped and life expectancy increased, China ageing process will proceed at a very fast space and around the middle of the...

We estimate the impact of pension enrollment on mental well-being using China’s New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS), the largest existing pension program in the world. Since its launch in 2009, more than 400 million Chinese have enrolled in the NRPS. We first describe plausible pathways through...

Cognitive impairment poses considerable challenges among older adults, with the protective role of family support becoming increasingly crucial. This study examines the role of children's residential proximity and spousal presence with dementia risk in cognitively impaired older adults. We...