Dynamic aspects of family transfers

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: McGarry, Kathleen
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2016.03.008
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 1-13
• 关键词: Family transfers; altruism

摘要

Parents transfer a great deal to their adult children, and we have rich theoretical models providing a framework for these transfers. However, both the models and existing empirical work typically examine behavior in the cross section. To date, we know little about the dynamic aspects of family transfers. Here I examine transfers over a span of 17 years and find substantial changes in recipiency over time and a strong negative correlation between transfers and transitory income. I also find that events such as job loss and divorce are strong predictors of parental transfers and, although rare, are typically associated with larger transfers than income alone might predict. Finally, transfers are distributed unequally across siblings, and perhaps surprisingly, the distribution of transfers becomes even more unequal when examined over an extended period of time than in any single year. The evidence presented here thus suggests that dynamic analyses can provide insights into behavior that are impossible to obtain in a static context. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.