There is a strong intergenerational correlation in welfare participation, but this does not imply that parental welfare receipt induces child receipt. While there are a few quasi-experimental studies that provide estimates of the causal effect of parental welfare participation for children from...

This paper studies how access to public pensions affects old-age support and child investment in traditional societies. Guided by predictions from an overlapping generations model, we analyze the influences of a new pension program in rural People's Republic of China, using a...

This paper uses a policy quasi-experiment created by the introduction of an old-age unconditional cash transfer program in Bolivia to study the intra-household income allocation process towards children's educational expenditure by ethnicity and gender of the recipient. Taking advantage of a...

Why do people have kids in developed societies? We propose an empirical test of two alternative theories - children as "consumptionʺ vs. "investmentʺ good. We use as a natural experiment the Italian pension reforms of the 90s that introduced a clear discontinuity in the treatment across...

This paper makes use of the most recent social pension reform in rural China to examine whether receipt of the pension payment equips adult children of pensioners to migrate. Employing a regression discontinuity (hereafter RD) design to a primary longitudinal survey, this paper overcomes...

Ghanaian custom views children as members of either their mother's or father's lineage (extended family), but not both. Patrilineal custom charges a man's lineage with caring for his widow and children, while matrilineal custom places this burden on the widows' lineage – her father, brothers,...

This paper uses a policy quasi-experiment created by the introduction of an old-age unconditional cash transfer program in Bolivia to study the intra-household income allocation process towards children's educational expenditure by ethnicity and gender of the recipient. Taking advantage of a...

In this paper, I take advantage of newly available data in the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to document outcomes among individuals with deceased parents. I focus first on minors and find that about 2 million children in the United States have a biological mother or father...

There are increasing concerns about whether Americans are saving enough for retirement. Recent research has called for improved understanding of the relationship between family structure and economic preparation for retirement at earlier stages of the life course. Using multiple years of the...