Can Policy Change Culture? Government Pension Plans and Traditional Kinship Practices

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Bau, Natalie
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; National Bureau of Economic Research; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR)
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0002-8282
• DOI: 10.1257/aer.20190098
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: 1880-1917
• 关键词: fertility; marriage; GENDER; women; ECONOMICS; AFRICA; NORMS; work; RISK; AGE

摘要

Policies may change the incentives that allow cultural practices to persist. To test this, I study matrilocality and patrilocality, kinship traditions that determine daughters' and sons' post-marriage residences, and thus, which gender lives with and supports parents in their old age. Two separate policy experiments in Ghana and Indonesia show that pension policies reduce the practice of these traditions. I also show that these traditions incentivize parents to invest in the education of children who traditionally coreside with them. Consequently, when pension plans change cultural practices, they also reduce educational investment. This finding further demonstrates that policy can change culture.