Childhood Send-Down Experience and Old-Age Support to Parents: The Twins Experiment in China

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Zhang, Hongliang; Zhang, Junsen; Zhang, Ning
• 署名单位: Zhejiang University; University of Oxford
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1542-4766
• DOI: 10.1093/jeea/jvad011
• 发表日期: 2023
• 页码: 1647-1685
• 关键词: impure altruism; CHILDREN; preferences; CHOICE; income; love

摘要

In the mass movement of sending urban youth to the countryside during China's Cultural Revolution, many families with multiple age-eligible children were forced to make a send-down choice among the siblings. We exploit this rare social experiment and employ data on urban twins in China to investigate the effect of childhood send-down experience on children's old-age support to parents. We find that compared with their twin siblings who had stayed in the city, send-downs were less likely to make a monetary transfer to parents and also tended to transfer less. We show that the inferior transfer behavior of send-downs was not due to any income disadvantage or selection of family's send-down choice in terms of children's altruism endowment. After ruling out the income and selection channel explanations, we posit that the inferior transfer behavior of send-downs is driven by the adverse effect of childhood send-down experience on children's willingness to provide old-age support to parents, which could work through both pure altruism and warm glow.