This study will lead to a better understanding of the role of the family in providing support for elderly parents by providing an analysis of the relative importance of various motives for transfers, in both directions, between parents and their children over the life cycle. The theoretical framework used in this project emphasis the interplay between the roles of the family in determining its fertility, its investment in the human capital of its children, its use of intrafamily transfers to smooth consumption over the life cycles of its members and across uncertain states of world, and the roles of transfers in determining the distribution of welfare among different generations within the family, particularly the children's provision of monetary and non-monetary support to their parents in old age and ill health. The study use data from the Malaysian Family Life Surveys (MFLS) to test hypotheses derived from the economic theory of the family concerning the determinants and consequences of intergenerational transfers within the family. Malaysia provides a cultural context in which intergenerational transfers are an important dimension of family relationships. The MFLS survey includes questions about intergenerational transfers that have been explicitly designed by the investigators to generate information that can be used to test the hypotheses specified in this proposal. The study's empirical work will consider both monetary and non-monetary (e.g., time and in-kind) forms. The empirical models will be formulated to incorporate a number of hypotheses from the theory including: (a) The """"""""parental hypothesis"""""""" which suggests that parents make implicit loans to finance the education of their children and children repay these loans by supporting their parents in old age, (b) the """"""""Greenhalgh hypothesis"""""""" that the earnings of girls are used by parents to finance the education of their brothers who, in turn, are primarily responsible for the old age support of their parents, (c) the """"""""Cox hypothesis"""""""" that care by children for their infirm elderly parents generates transfers characterized by a quid pro quo exchange motive rather than by altruistic motivations.
| Lillard, L A; Willis, R J (1997) Motives for intergenerational transfers: evidence from Malaysia. Demography 34:115-34 |
