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This study examines the intergenerational consequences of court-imposed monetary sanctions for parents and children. Research on punishment and families has generally focused on imprisonment, yet monetary sanctions are far more commonly imposed. We extend research on intergenerational financial exchanges to conceptualize payment of monetary sanctions as stigmatized transfers, analyzing 70 semi-structured interviews with debtholders in Minnesota. Adult children reported perceiving anger and financial strain from family members who provide assistance. Those with minor children expressed hopelessness, stress, and financial strain, as they prioritized basic needs over meeting their outstanding financial obligations. We conclude by discussing the implications of these intergenerational impacts for research, law, and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently scholars have turned their attention to the role of intergenerational financial assistance in facilitating entry into home ownership for young adults. This practice has been identified as a means through which intergenerational inequalities may be translated into intragenerational inequalities. However, the question of what this form of financial dependence on family means for both young adults and their parents has received less attention. This article reports on the findings of a study conducted with 15 related donor-recipient pairs (30 in-depth interviews in total) in the UK in 2019. Drawing on these findings, we show that the provision and receipt of intergenerational financial assistance does not simply reflect family practices, but instead plays an active part in developing and conveying them. We ultimately contend that the practice of giving and receiving financial transfers shapes individuals' broader orientations to the property market, and to financial decision-making and planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper seeks to understand whether the current basic endowment insurance policy has properly played the role of supporting the elderly needs through intergenerational support within the family. Theoretically, there are problems of the imbalanced structure of pension security, retirees' comparatively higher pension and the low-level security of young people's in-service income, and drawbacks of the existing endowment insurance system, both have a certain causal relationship with "gnawing the old." Data on China's family tracking survey in 2016 (CFPS2016), Probit model, IV and PSM robustness testing methods were also used to study the relationship between parents' pensions and their grownup children's "gnawing-the-old" behavior. The results show that: (1) Compared with young people from families without pension income, those with pensioned parent(s) will less possibly choose to work; the parents' financial assistance behavior would restrain the children's intention to work and increase the possibility of "gnawing the old"; (2) Neither the amount of pension income nor financial assistance given to the children is significantly related to young people's "gnawing the old"; (3) Young people's "gnawing the old" behaviors are different according to their parents' professions and living areas; (4) The gap between parents' pension income and children's in-service income also adds to the causes of "gnawing the old." The policy implications of these findings are discussed particularly the formulation of a scientific mechanism for pension income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the headwaters of the Yenisei River in Tuva and northern Mongolia, nomadic pastoralists move between camps in a seasonal rotation that facilitates their animals' access to high-quality grasses and shelter. The use and informal ownership of these camps depending on season helps illustrate evolutionary and ecological principles underlying variation in property relations. Given relatively stable patterns of precipitation and returns to capital improvement, families generally benefit from reusing the same camps year after year. We show that locations with higher economic defensibility and capital investment—winter camps and camps located in mountain/river valleys—are claimed and inherited more frequently than summer camps and camps located in open steppe. Camps are inherited patrilineally and matrilineally at a ratio of 2 : 1. Despite its practical importance, camp inheritance is not associated with livestock wealth today, which is better predicted by education and wealth outside the pastoral economy. The relationship between the livestock wealth of parents and their adult children is significantly positive, but relatively low compared to other pastoralists. The degree of inequality in livestock wealth, however, is very close to that of other pastoralists. This is understandable considering the durability and defensibility of animal wealth and economies of scale common across pastoralists. This article is part of the theme issue 'Evolutionary ecology of inequality'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly interest in assets has grown over recent years, with housing receiving particular attention. At the same time a related body of work has focussed on intergenerational financial assistance with home ownership, considering how proximity to assets may lead to direct assistance with purchasing property. In this article I draw on interviews conducted with 80 donors and recipients of family financial assistance with first home ownership in order to consider the role of assets (specifically property) in the imagined futures of the recipients, focusing particularly on ambitions to own investment properties. I argue that the provision and receipt of financial assistance of this type is underpinned by shared investor subjectivities. I then consider how these investor subjectivities may lead to specific orientations to property investment in the recipients' imagined futures, finding that many of them aim to use property wealth to meet some of the costs of social reproduction in ways that recreate the gender dynamics that they experienced during their own childhoods. I ultimately draw together these claims to contend that the Minskian household is perhaps best thought of as a kinship network, and to identify some of the empirical features of these networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In classical evolutionary models, the force of natural selection diminishes with age toward zero by last reproduction. However, intergenerational resource transfers and other late-life contributions in social species may select for postreproductive longevity. We present a formal framework for estimating indirect fitness contributions via production transfers in a skills-intensive foraging niche, reflecting kinship and cooperation among group members. Among contemporary human hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists, indirect fitness contributions from transfers exceed direct reproductive contributions from before menopause until ages when surpluses end, around the modal age of adult death (∼70 y). Under reasonable assumptions, these benefits are the equivalent to having up to several more offspring after age 50. Despite early independence, minimal production surplus, and a shorter lifespan, chimpanzees could theoretically make indirect contributions if they adopted reliable food-sharing practices. Our results for chimpanzees hypothetically adopting hunter-gatherer subsistence suggest that a skills-intensive foraging ecology with late independence and late peak production could select for human-like life histories via positive feedback between longevity and late-life transfers. In contrast, life history changes preceding subsistence shifts would not favor further life extension or subsistence shifts. Our results formalize the theory that longevity can be favored under socioecological conditions characterized by parental and alloparental care funded through transfers of mid- to late-life production surpluses. We also extend our analysis beyond food transfers to illustrate the potential for indirect fitness contributions from pedagogy, or information transfers. While we focus mostly on humans, our approach is adaptable to any context or species where transfers can affect fitness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Retirement incomes and aged care have both received considerable policy attention in Australia over the last three decades, but as in other countries, the two financing systems have remained largely separate in policy and practice. The problem is located at the intersection of wider policy debates about shifts from public to private welfare and concerns over intergenerational equity. This paper aims to integrate these related debates by incorporating aged care into the "pillars" framework used to understand retirement incomes. We propose an Aged Care Superannuation Levy applied to superannuation fund earnings, winding back the large and growing public tax concessions that support this pillar of private defined contribution pensions in Australia's retirement income system. This revenue would create a social insurance pillar for aged care to stand alongside the four other pillars of retirement incomes that interact variously with aged care financing. Interest in a social insurance pillar of aged care financing is renewed in the light of the Royal Commission into quality and safety of aged care that reported in February 2021. As the Royal Commission recommendations on financing were divided and not taken up in government policy, the way remains opens for further consideration of the alternative approach proposed here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews current housing mobility patterns in Hungary, with specific regard to relocations within the rental sector and mobility from the owner occupied to the rental sector. By doing this, it intends to gain a more profound insight into housing mobility within or into less secure positions in the housing system. The analysis explores the role of factors beyond basic socioeconomic variables, such as access to different sources of housing finance, to housing mobility, through multivariable analysis of representative survey data. It points out how the lack of access to intergenerational transfers, savings, and mortgage leads to the inability of households to exit the rental sector. Besides, it draws attention to formerly mortgaged households moving from homeownership to the rental sector. It discusses the results in the context of Hungary's super-homeownership tenure structure, the highly ownership-oriented public policies, the lack of effective measures to tackle housing unaffordability and the loosely regulated rental sector. The analysis is based on data from a large sample personal survey conducted in 2018 (N=2650). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an alternative channel for elderly consumption response to housing value changes by focusing on the informal financial markets. This channel may be important, particularly in a society where the elderly are less mobile and have limited access to the formal financial markets. In such a society, elderly homeowners may leave their housing assets to their children, and in exchange receive cash to fund consumption. Japanese household-level data on the elderly are used to examine this possibility. The results indeed suggest that the consumption of the elderly responds to changes in their house values through the intrafamily finance channel alone. The marginal propensity to consume out of housing wealth is only 0.01. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the intergenerational effects following the positive changes in women's inheritance rights in India. Using the Indian Human Development Survey data for rural India and a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the property rights reform significantly empowered women through increased education. However, we find no intergenerational effect of the reform on children's education. We explore two potential mechanisms to explain these results: the role of status conflict among spouses and that of a child's birth-order and gender. Given that a woman's bargaining power may depend on her relative position to that of her husband, we investigate this channel and find a significant decrease in children's education in households where fathers are less educated than mothers. Accounting for a child's birth-order and gender, we find no evidence of son-preference through the education channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In line with the previous research, we confirm that welfare programmes in Hungary are poorly targeted in terms of socio‐economic status (SES). However, by adding age to our models, we demonstrate that even if the status is irrelevant in explaining access to social benefits and services, age is not. Applying simple regression techniques, we compare both the theoretical importance (based on regression coefficients) and the dispersion importance (using Shapley‐value decomposition of the R2) of age and SES in explaining the receipt of and contributions to both in‐kind and in‐cash benefits at the level of the general government in Hungary. We conclude that what appears to be a dysfunctional instrument in alleviating poverty and inequality in a univariate model is actually a channel of resource reallocation that connects working‐age people to children and to the elderly when the model includes two predictors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What becomes of class when residential property prices in major cities around the world accrue more income in a year than the average wage worker? This paper investigates the dynamic of combined wage disinflation and asset price inflation as a key to understanding the growth of inequality in recent decades. Taking the city of Sydney, Australia, as exemplary of a dynamic that has unfolded across the Anglo-American economies, it explains how residential property was constructed as a financial asset and how government policies helped to generate the phenomenal house price inflation and unequal capital gains of recent years. Proceeding in close conversation with Thomas Piketty's work on inequality and recent sociological contributions to the question of class, we argue that employment and wage-based taxonomies of class are no longer adequate for understanding a process of stratification in which capital gains, capital income and intergenerational transfers are preeminent. We conclude the paper by outlining a new asset-based class taxonomy which we intend to specify further in subsequent work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While previous studies have extensively explored the impact of housing wealth on household consumption, only a limited number have investigated the role of bequest motives. This study focuses on understanding how bequest motives influence household consumption and decisions related to the intergenerational transfer of housing assets. Using panel data from three waves of the China Family Panel Studies collected biennially from 2014 to 2018, we empirically assess the housing wealth effect (HWE) and find that bequest motives play a significant negative role in this context, producing a dampening effect on household life satisfaction. Our results also suggest that the influence of bequest motives on housing wealth is more prominent among economically disadvantaged households, households with higher levels of education, and middle-aged and older households. These findings imply that implementing inheritance taxes could facilitate the leveraging of the HWE, ultimately promoting increased household consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intergenerational transfers are one of the most important and contentious aspects of modern welfare systems. In today's societies, financial transfers between adult generations in the family are an important part of the intergenerational link. They are important not only for the family as a whole - how it distributes its resources and ensures its members' well-being - but also for broader aspects such as welfare policy, social inequality, and social integration. The financial transfers are playing an important role in accumulation and distribution of the wealth. In consequence these financial transfers are important not only for the individuals, but also for the social aspects of the wealth redistribution. Using the dataset provided by Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we want to create the profile of the persons over 50 from Romania that give and receive financial aid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is known that the education of significant others may affect an individual's mortality. This paper extends an emerging body of research by investigating the effect of having highly educated adult children on the longevity of older parents in Europe, especially parents with low educational attainment. Using a sample of 15,015 individuals (6,620 fathers and 8,395 mothers) aged 50 and above, with 1,847 recorded deaths, over a mean follow-up period of 10.9 years from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we examine whether the well-established socio-economic gradient in mortality among parents is modified when their adult children have higher educational attainment than their parents. We find that having highly educated adult children is associated with reduced mortality risks for fathers and mothers with low educational attainment, compared to their counterparts whose adult children have only compulsory education. The association is stronger in early older age (ages 50–74) than in later older age (ages 75 and over). Part of the association appears to be explained by health behaviours (physical (in)activity) and health status (self-rated health). Our findings suggest that the socio-economic–mortality gradient among older parents might be better captured using an intergenerational approach that recognises the advantage of having highly educated adult children, especially for fathers and mothers with only compulsory education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resource sharing has always been a central component of human sociality. Children require heavy investments in human capital; during working years, help is needed due to illness, disability, or bad luck. While hunter-gatherer elders assisted their descendants, more recently, elderly withdraw from work and require assistance as well. Willingness to share has been critically important for our past evolutionary success and our present daily lives. Here, we document a strong linear relationship between the public and private sharing generosity of a society and the average length of life of its members. Our findings from 34 countries on six continents suggest that survival is higher in societies that provide more support and care for one another. We suggest that this support reduces mortality by meeting urgent material needs, but also that sharing generosity may reflect the strength of social connectedness, which itself benefits human health and wellbeing and indirectly raises survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of the current study is to analyze how the assistance that one's siblings provide to their parents impacts one's own contributions. Siblings' assistance is measured as the total combined number of hours and the total combined cash that one's siblings provide, excluding one's own level of contributions. Design/methodology/approach: We use first differences and instrumental variables approaches to address unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity of assistance provided to one's parents. Findings: A 10 percent increase in siblings' time and cash assistance is associated with an increase in the individual levels of adult children's time contributions by about 6.72 percent and cash contributions by 7.43 percent. Practical implications: Crowd-in is meaningful from a policy perspective as it suggests that upstream transfers are unlikely to crowd-out similar transfers from siblings. Private transfers are unlikely to decrease in response to public transfers. Social implications: Policy that incentivizes private transfers from one individual may lead to increased levels of transfers from their siblings. Policies such as tax incentives that encourage contributions from adult children are likely to have a magnified effect. Originality/value: Our approach is novel in that we utilize data on full sibling sets using the children of the Health and Retirement Study respondents. This allows the consideration of crowding effects that transfers from siblings have. Other authors perform tests to determine whether or not altruistic transfer motives are present. With altruistic motives, public transfers are expected to crowd-out private transfers. Our approach focuses on crowding behavior regardless of the underlying motives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article progresses understandings of contemporary middle-class housing aspirations and the socialization of these within families. It examines Australian middle-class homeowners' dispositions towards mortgage debt, using qualitative Bourdieusian analytics. By avoiding the common reduction of housing aspirations to tenure preferences, it foregrounds diverse orientations towards home-buying that suggest cultural forms of middle-class heterogeneity in the housing field. It then identifies how within-family socialization conditions these differing orientations, including through parental guidance and observational learning. This "immaterial inheritance" variously promotes and deters property speculation, for instance by imparting competence (e.g. housing literacy) and confidence to invest, and thus begins to shed light on the under-explored cultural dimensions of class in intensifying housing commodification. Sharper understandings of the trajectories of cultural capitals over time (and their interaction with trajectories of economic capitals), hold promise for explaining how these calibrate the way intergenerational transfers shape inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial support for immigrant-origin children is crucial for their integration and success in the host society. Family solidarity norms among minority populations, however, tend to differ from those regulating intergenerational support exchange among natives. Do such differences reflect specific cultural preferences and expectations? Using original data collected via a semi-structured questionnaire featuring vignettes, we explore values and norms about parental financial support towards children among Chinese, Maghrebi and Filipino immigrants in Italy. The vignette analysed here contrasts the beneficiaries of support provided by parents to children (sons versus daughters) and the object of support (opening a new business versus pursuing higher education). Results point to a preference for supporting offspring – especially daughters – who want to invest in an educational career. This attitude is more widespread among Filipino and Chinese respondents than among Maghrebis. Daughters are favoured over sons among Filipinos, whereas the opposite holds for the other two groups. Supporting adult children's higher education is seen as an efficient investment strategy, reflecting a normative view of children's life courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks: What becomes of the idealized asset-accumulating investor subject rallied in asset-based welfare policy and discourse in the context of mounting social risks facing families? It brings into dialogue two disconnected literatures: one on financialized subjectivities, drawing on post-structuralist and Foucauldian analysis, the other on welfare states drawing more heavily on comparative political economy. Drawing on homeowner interviews in Melbourne (Australia), it identifies how parent homeowners' devise housing strategies to manage their children's housing welfare risks. Their housing investment and landlordism strategies align with financialized subjectivities, but other strategies subvert or reject these subject positions. Its first contribution is to specify how an Australian refamilization of welfare responsibilities, including for housing, is unfolding as processes of financialization erode the efficacy of growing state social spending. Its second contribution is to challenge the individual subject of asset-based welfare (ABW) and introduce intergenerational assistance as an under-explored contingency for ABW projects, and further driver for welfare inequalities between and within generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Childless individuals are often depicted as 'selfish' as they opt out of raising children in favour of investing resources in themselves. Yet no research has investigated whether this claim holds in domains of social life such as intergenerational family support. Using data from the Generations and Gender Survey for 11 European countries, this article examines differences between childless and non-childless individuals in the provision of financial, practical and emotional transfers to their elderly parents. Results support the idea that the childless are more prone to provide upward support than individuals with children. Specifically, estimates from multivariate logistic regression and propensity score specifications suggest that, ceteris paribus , childless adults are about 20–40 per cent more likely to provide support to their parents, with the association driven by transfers to elderly mothers. These findings enrich the literature on childlessness and ageing, and support the view that researchers and policy makers should take into more consideration not only what childless people receive or need in old age, but also what they provide as middle-aged adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Economic investments in children may represent a powerful mechanism to explain differences in child outcomes across family types. Unfortunately, evidence on child-related spending across family structures remains poorly understood. Using the Consumer Expenditure Survey (1996–2015), this study is the first to investigate patterns of child-related spending in an increasingly common type of extended family household: multigenerational households, in which children reside with at least one parent and grandparent. This study also contributes to a growing literature giving primacy to parents' socioeconomic disadvantage as moderating the association between multigenerational relationships and child well-being. Results indicate that, when compared to similar two-generation households, multigenerational households are associated with increased spending on education and with decreased spending on child care. Differences in child-related spending between multigenerational and two-generation households differ according to parents' income and relationship status. Overall, living with grandparents represents an adaptive strategy that helps low-income or single parents invest more money in their children's education, hobbies and activities, and to save on the costs of child care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unstable couple relationships and high rates of repartnering have increased the share of U.S. families with stepkin. Yet data on stepfamily structure are from earlier periods, include only coresident stepkin, or cover only older adults. In this study, we use new data on family structure and transfers in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to describe the prevalence and numbers of stepparents and stepchildren for adults of all ages and to characterize the relationship between having stepkin and transfers of time and money between generations, regardless of whether the kin live together. We find that having stepparents and stepchildren is very common among U.S. households, especially younger households. Furthermore, stepkin substantially increase the typical household's family size; stepparents and stepchildren increase a household's number of parents and adult children by nearly 40 % for married/cohabiting couples with living parents and children. However, having stepkin is associated with fewer transfers, particularly time transfers between married women and their stepparents and stepchildren. The increase in the number of family members due to stepkin is insufficient to compensate for the lower likelihood of transfers in stepfamilies. Our findings suggest that recent cohorts with more stepkin may give less time assistance to adult children and receive less time assistance from children in old age than prior generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine how family housing wealth affects homeownership transitions during divergent periods of credit access. I use matched parent-child data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and exploit variation across local housing markets, as well as the recent housing cycle, to assess this relationship. I explore how transfers are affected by parent housing values, for different housing market experiences, and for households with renter parents in these same neighborhoods. I find that increases in parent housing values are correlated with an increased likelihood of receiving a transfer, larger transfer amounts, and an increased likelihood of transitioning to homeownership during the housing bust, but not during the housing boom. In contrast, households with renter parents in these same neighborhoods are not differentially affected by local housing market fluctuations during the housing bust. Overall, my findings suggest that family wealth matters more for home purchases when there are barriers to formal channels of mortgage borrowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses 1986-2012 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort data to investigate the relationship between raising children and net worth among younger Baby Boomer parents. I combine fixed-effects and unconditional quantile regression models to estimate changes in net worth associated with having children in different age groups across the wealth distribution. This allows me to test whether standard economic models for savings and consumption over the life course hold for families at different wealth levels. My findings show that the wealth effects of children vary throughout the distribution. Among families at or below the median, children of all ages were associated with wealth declines, likely due to the costs of child-rearing. However, at the 75th percentile and above, wealth increased with the presence of younger children but decreased after those children reached age 18. My results, therefore, provide evidence for a saving and investment model of child-rearing among wealthier families but not among families at or below median wealth levels. For these families, the costs of raising children largely outweighed motivations for saving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using microdata from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), this study examines the role of inheritance, income and welfare state policies in explaining differences in household net wealth within and between euro area countries. First, about one-third of the households in the 13 European countries we study report having received an inheritance, and these households have considerably higher net wealth than those which did not inherit. Second, regression analyses on households' relative wealth position show that, on average, having received an inheritance lifts a household by about 14 net wealth percentiles. At the same time, each additional percentile in the income distribution is associated with about 0.4 net wealth percentiles. These results are consistent across countries. Third, multilevel cross-country regressions show that the degree of welfare state spending across countries is negatively correlated with household net wealth. These findings suggest that social services provided by the state are substitutes for private wealth accumulation and partly explain observed differences in levels of household net wealth across European countries. In particular, the effect of substitution relative to net wealth decreases with growing wealth levels. This implies that an increase in welfare state spending goes along with an increase—rather than a decrease—of observed wealth inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper estimates the impacts of intergenerational financial transfers on the physical health, mental health and perceived financial security of Australian males and females. We distinguish between two key sources of intergenerational financial transfers – inheritances and inter vivos parental cash transfers. Taking nationally representative data from the 2001–2015 Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, we develop a two-stage modelling strategy that controls for potential bias in reported health and wellbeing responses that arise due to unobserved heterogeneity. In the first stage, propensity score matching is applied to achieve matched treatment and control groups, where the former is comprised of intergenerational financial transfer beneficiaries while the latter is made up of non-beneficiaries with a matched set of characteristics to the beneficiaries. This is followed by the application of regression models that further control for unobservable heterogeneity, so that the coefficients on the intergenerational financial transfer predictors can be attributed to the effect of the transfers on health and wellbeing. We do not find systematic evidence of a causal link between receipt of intergenerational financial transfers and health and wellbeing outcomes. This applies to both inheritances and inter vivos parental cash transfers, and for both males and females. Highlights • We test the effect of inheritances and parental transfers on health and wellbeing. • We do not find any systematic evidence of causal empirical associations. • Empirical associations are not biased by unobservable confounding factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine birth cohort differences in parents' provision of monetary help to adult children with particular focus on the extent to which cohort differences in family structure and the transition to adulthood influence these changes. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study from 1994 to 2010, we compare financial help to children of three respondent cohorts as the parents in these birth cohorts from ages 53-58 to 57-62. We find that transfers to children have increased among more recent cohorts. Two trends-declining family size and children's delay in marriage-account for part of the increase across cohorts. However, other trends, such as the increase in the number of stepchildren and increasing child's income level, tend to decrease the observed cohort trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Families and policies both are main vehicles of intergenerational transfers. Working-age people are net contributors; children and older persons net beneficiaries. However, there is an asymmetry in socialization. Working-age people pay taxes and social security contributions to institutionalize care for older persons as a generation, but invest private resources to raise their own children, often with large social returns. This results in asymmetric statistical visibility. Elderly transfers are near-fully observed in National Accounts; those to children much less. Analysing ten European societies, we employ National Transfer Accounts to include public and private transfers, and National Time Transfer Accounts to value unpaid household labour. All three transfer channels combined, children receive more than twice as many per-capita resources as older persons. Europe is a continent of elderly-oriented welfare states and strongly child-oriented parents. Since children are ever-scarcer public goods in aging societies, why has investment in them not been socialized more? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the home-leaving of young adults in Gothenburg, Sweden, in the period 1915-1943. We used individual-level panel data from population registers and poll-tax records, taking a competing risk design for the analysis of the determinants of leaving home to marry, or for non-familial living. We found a transitional, marriage-driven pattern of leaving home that neither fits the old context of life cycle service, nor the alternative modern routes out of the parental home into unmarried householdship. Young adults typically stayed at home until they married, although some moved out to temporary non-familial living first. Non-familial living consisted mainly of lodging in another household, but working outside it, which in a way was a forerunner of the modern pattern, in sharp contrast with the remnant of preindustrial times: the flow from rural areas into Gothenburg of teenage women immigrants to become residential domestic servants. Interestingly, we found that the main determinants of home-leaving in studies of modern-day populations were equally important in the population of Gothenburg in 1915-1943. For both young men and young women, having their own resources (employment, earnings) was positively associated with the likelihood of leaving the parental home. We also found clear gender differences. A higher level of human capital of the father was associated with later home-leaving to marry for sons, and earlier leaving for non-familial living for daughters. Lower levels of household income, or the presence of minor siblings or a widowed parent were push factors for non-familial living for daughters. We found no similar push factors for sons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding patterns of intergenerational support is critical within the context of demographic change, such as changing family structures and population ageing. Existing research has focused on intergenerational support at a given time in the individuals' lifecourse, e.g. from adult children towards older parents and vice versa; however, few studies have focused on the dynamic nature of such support. Analysing data from the 1958 National Child Development Study, this paper investigates the extent to which the receipt of parental help earlier in the lifecourse affects the chances of adult children reciprocating with support towards their parents later in life. The findings show that three-quarters of mid-life adults had received some support from their parents earlier in life, and at age 50 more than half were providing care to their parents. Patterns of support received and provided across the lifecourse differ markedly by gender, with sons being more likely to have received help with finances earlier in the lifecourse, and daughters with child care. The results highlight that care provision towards parents was associated with support receipt earlier in life. However, the degree of reciprocity varies according to the type of care provided by children. Such findings have implications for informal care provision by adult children towards future cohorts of older people, and by extension, the organisation of social care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ageing attitudes and long-term care planning behavior of adult Hispanics in New London, Connecticut, a town with 30 thousand inhabitants that is rapidly ageing. We conducted six focus groups and had 37 participants share their ageing perceptions and long-term care needs. Our main findings suggest that informal care arrangements are vulnerable and unsustainable especially since women have historically and disproportionately provided most family eldercare even at their own personal and financial expense. Though male participants expected their female relatives to care for them when they age and need personal assistance, female participants did not necessarily expect the same from their relatives including their daughters. Also, both formal and government long-term care systems lack cultural competence and can be prohibitively costly. Therefore, Hispanics plan for ageing within their circles of family care and their resilience in a context of cultural exclusion and socio-economic disadvantage epitomizes strong intergenerational values. These support networks may help explain why may outlive whites (the 'Hispanic paradox') who, on average, have higher wealth and education levels. Long-term care planning is a complex process that cannot be relayed to families only. Adequate training for family members from other relatives, and from private and government entities to appropriately convey this type of planning is vital to ensure that Hispanic families understand their options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to test alternative models of long-term caring motives. We consider three main motives: pure altruism, exchange and family norm. Our database is the second wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) which allows linking almost perfectly and with complete information children and their parents' characteristics. Comparing the empirical results to the theoretical models developed, it appears that, depending on the regions analyzed, long-term caring is driven by moderate altruism or by family norm, while Alessie et al. (De Economist 162(2):193-213, 2014), also using SHARE data, stress the importance of exchange motive in intergenerational transfers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid demographic change, economic growth, and evolving social norms have put increasing pressure on the traditional system of filial piety and family-based eldercare in China. This paper examines the current role of intergenerational transfers in providing old-age support using nationally representative data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study. The analysis explores varied modes of care that exist in rural and urban areas, as well as the role of internal migration in influencing methods of old-age support. The results paint a rich description of the contemporary dynamics between filial obligations and economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many Western countries the edges of ownership form a neglected zone between the majority tenure, sustainable owner-occupation, and the minority experience, long-term renting. In these tenure-divided societies, it is surprising that so little attention has been paid to the zone of transition between styles of accommodation, not least because the edges of ownership are now so precarious. The six papers included in this special issue advance empirical and conceptual understandings of these neglected zones, showing how, increasingly, they compromise the sustainability of housing solutions. Some approach this by developing an understanding of how the changing fungibility of housing wealth has transformed its welfare role, while at the same time exposing those on the edges of ownership to heightened levels of risk. A second set of papers report from a variety of jurisdictions to show how the structure of the edges of owner-occupation vary across cultures and countries, and change over time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Australia has a long tradition of home-ownership though there is evidence that rates of home-ownership are declining. Anecdotal evidence suggests that older Australians are facilitating home-ownership for younger cohorts through intergenerational transfers. This paper examines the relationship between housing tenure and transfers in the form of bequests and gifts. We find evidence that intergenerational transfers are associated with a higher probability that recipients subsequently transition into home-ownership. For those at the edges of home-ownership, intergenerational transfers potentially play an important role in facilitating home-ownership. Moreover, given the central role of home-ownership for the savings and wealth accumulation of Australians, such patterns may exacerbate existing inequality and potentially undermine the role that housing may play in a broad-based policy of asset-based welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In order to understand intergenerational financial transfers and subjective well-being for older mothers, this study argues that marital status is an important factor to be considered. Using the first wave of the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging (KLoSA), this study finds that married older mothers report higher levels of life satisfaction when they provide economic support but widowed older mothers feel higher levels of life satisfaction when they receive economic support. Also, regular or irregular financial support appears to also matter in the associations between financial support and life satisfaction. These findings suggest that married and widowed older mothers have different viewpoints about the parent-children relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exchange of informal support within the social network plays a vital role in enabling older adults to remain living in the community as they age. Following spousal loss in later life, the exchange of instrumental support is of particular importance in order to meet the practical and financial needs of the bereaved spouse. Adult children are typically the primary source of social contact and informal support for older widowed adults following bereavement. However, very little is known of the longitudinal changes that occur in the exchange of instrumental support with children during the transition to late-life widowhood. Trajectories and predictors of change in material and time support exchange in parent–child relationships were modelled over a 15-year period for 1,266 older adults (mean age 76.7 years). Widowed older adults received more material and time support from their children than their married peers. Proximity to children, age at spousal loss, self-rated health, cognitive functioning and income were predictive of levels of exchanged instrumental support in late-life widowhood. Short-term reciprocity appears to continue in parent–child relationships during late-life widowhood. The implications of the findings for policy and practice are discussed, including the role of children in the support networks of older widowed adults and the potential difficulties faced by those who do not have access to informal avenues of support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how parental investments on children affect elderly support, and how this effect is contingent on emotional closeness or parental authority. Data collected from 770 elderly parents residing in rural China were analyzed. We gathered dichotomous data for (a) whether parents invested on their children via financial or instrumental means (i.e., parental investments) and (b) whether parents reported closeness to their children (i.e., emotional closeness) and whether children respected them (i.e., parental authority). We examined the relation between these variables and children’s elderly support (financial, instrumental, and emotional). We tested models in two ways, one examining the direct effect of investments, and another testing the interactions between investments and closeness or authority. We first found that investments were not directly associated with elderly support, although the closeness and authority were. Additionally, the association between investments and support was found within parents who reported authority or closeness with their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The "Great Recession" shocked the primary institutions that help individuals and families meet their needs and plan for the future. This study examines middle-aged adults' experiences of financial loss and considers how socioeconomic and interpersonal resources facilitate or hinder maintaining a sense of control in the face of economic uncertainty. Method: Using the 2006 and 2010 waves of the Health and Retirement Study, change in income and wealth, giving help to and receiving help from others, household complexity, and sense of control were measured among middle-aged adults (n = 3,850; age = 51-60 years). Results: Socioeconomic resources predicted both the level of and change in the engagement of interpersonal resources prior to and during the Great Recession. Experiences of financial loss were associated with increased engagement of interpersonal resources and decreased sense of control. The effect of financial loss was dampened by education. Sense of control increased with giving help and decreased with household complexity. Discussion: Findings suggest that, across socioeconomic strata, proportional loss in financial resources resulted in a loss in sense of control. However, responses to financial loss differed by socioeconomic status, which differentiated the ability to maintain a sense of control following financial loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the effect of birth order on education, occupation, and parental transfers using four cross sections of the French Wealth surveys conducted between 1992 and 2010. Estimates from ordered models confirm the presence of a first born advantage in education and occupation, the latter persisting to a lesser extent after controlling for education. Strikingly, parents are on average more likely to make transfers to first-born children, although the vast majority provides cash or property gifts to all of their children. This first-born advantage in transfers is uncorrelated with the likelihood of having attained a higher education or better occupation. Overall, our findings suggest that in France, the mechanism supporting the first born advantage may not stem from confluence effects or family resource dilution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural selection can favour health at youth or middle age (high reproductive value) over health at old age (low reproductive value). This means, all else being equal, selection for cancer suppression should dramatically drop after reproductive age. However, in species with significant parental investment, the capacity to enhance inclusive fitness may increase the reproductive value of older individuals or even those past reproductive age. Variation in parental investment levels could therefore contribute to variation in cancer susceptibility across species. In this article, we describe a simple model and framework for the evolution of cancer suppression with varying levels of parental investment and use this model to make testable predictions about variation in cancer suppression across species. This model can be extended to show that selection for cancer suppression is stronger in species with cooperative breeding systems and intergenerational transfers. We consider three cases that can select for cancer suppression into old age: (i) extended parental care that increases the survivorship of their offspring, (ii) grandparents contributing to higher fecundity of their children and (iii) cooperative breeding where helpers forgo reproduction or even survivorship to assist parents in having higher fecundity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides evidence of the prevalence of wills and the principles underpinning the intended distribution of estates in Australia. Intentions around wealth transfers and the social norms that underpin them occur in the context of predicted extensive intergenerational transfers from the ageing baby boomer generation, policies of self provision and user pays for care in old age, broader views on what constitutes 'family', the increased importance of the not-for-profit sector in the delivery of services, and the related need for philanthropy. A national telephone survey conducted in 2012 with 2,405 respondents aged 18 and over shows that wills are predominantly used to distribute assets to partners and/or equally to immediate descendants. There is little evidence that will makers are recognising a wider group of relationships, obligations and entitlements outside the traditional nuclear family, or that wills are being replaced by other mechanisms of wealth transfer. Only a minority consider bequests to charities as important. These findings reflect current social norms about entitlements to 'family' money, a narrow view of what and who constitutes 'family', limited obligation for testators to recompense individuals or organisations for care and support provided, and limited commitment to charitable organisations and civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of cooperative breeding is particularly complex in humans because many other traits that directly affect parental care (shorter birth intervals, increased offspring survivorship, juvenile dependence, and older ages at dispersal) also emerge during the Pleistocene. If human cooperative breeding is ancient, it likely evolved in a hominin lacking a fully modern life history. However, the impact that changing life history traits has on parental care and cooperative breeding has not been analytically investigated. We develop an exploratory model to simulate an economic problem that would have arisen over the course of hominin life history evolution to identify those transitions that produced the strongest pressures for cooperative childrearing. The model generates two central predictions. First, help within maternal-offspring groups can support early changes in juvenile dependence, dispersal age, birth intervals, and fertility. If so, maternal-juvenile cooperation may be an important but understudied step in the evolution of human cooperative breeding. Second, pressure to recruit adult cooperation is most pronounced under more derived conditions of late dispersal and later ages of juvenile dependence, with a strong interaction at short birth intervals. Our findings indicate that changes in life history traits that affect parental care are critical in considering background selective forces that shaped the evolution of cooperative breeding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper comments on the four main functions demographers perform: fact-finding, analysis, prediction, and policymaking. Successes in the first two of these are counterbalanced by weakness in predictive ability. The focus of the comments, however, is on policy. Demographers were influential in promoting efforts to lower very high fertility but are ineffectual in proposing policies that could reverse the tendency of fertility to sink well below replacement levels. The paper argues for a break from exclusive reliance on the standard measures of modern welfare states intended to raise fertility and urges exploration of radically new approaches. Two promising innovations are briefly outlined: one would give the right to vote to all citizens regardless of age, the voting right of minors being exercised by parental proxy, and another that would reform state-administered pension schemes by arranging a direct transfer of working children’s mandatory contributions to social security funds to their retired parents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A considerable body of evidence has now demonstrated positive correlations between grandparental presence and child health outcomes. It is typically assumed that such correlations exist because grandparental investment in their grandchildren improves child health and wellbeing. However, less is known about how grandparents allocate help to adult children and grandchildren, particularly in lower income contexts. Here we use detailed quantitative data from the longitudinal Indonesia Family Life Survey (data collected in 1993, 1997, 2000, 2007; n = 16,250) to examine grandparental help in a society transitioning both demographically and economically. We test the hypothesis that grandparents direct help preferentially towards those adult children and grandchildren most in need of help. This hypothesis was supported for help provided by married grandparents and single grandmothers, who tended to: provide more help to their adult children when this generation had young children themselves, provide financial help if their adult children were poorer, and provide more household help if their adult daughters worked outside the home. One unexpected result was that help from maternal and paternal grandparents is positively correlated; if one set of grandparents is helping the other set is more likely to help, counter to our predictions. These results provide support for the hypothesis that grandparents preferentially invest in some descendants over others, where married grandparents and single grandmothers tend to invest in those adult children and grandchildren with the most need. Investigating the effect of grandparents on child health outcomes may therefore be confounded by grandparent's preferential investment in needier descendants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study whether caregiving and intergenerational transfer decisions are sensitive to changes in economic incentives following the inception of a new unconditional and universal system of allowances and supports, after the introduction of the 2006 Promotion of Personal Autonomy and Care for Dependent Persons Act (SAAD in Spanish), and the ensuing effects of its austerity cuts after 2012. We find that whilst the introduction of a caregiving allowance (of a maximum value of €530 in 2011) increased the supply of informal caregiving by 20-22 percentual points (pp), the inception of a companion system of publicly subsidised homecare supports did not modify the supply of care. Consistent with an exchange motive for intergenerational transfers, we estimate an average 17 pp (8.2-8.7pp) increase (decrease) in downstream (upstream) transfers among those receiving caregiving allowances. Our estimates resulting from the reduction in the allowances and supports after the austerity cuts in 2012 are consistent with our main estimates, and suggest stronguer effects among lower-income families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We explain how upward transfers from adult children to their elderly parents might evolve as an interrelated feature of a deepening intergenerational division of labor. Humans have a particularly long period of juvenile dependence requiring both food and care time provided mainly by younger and older adults. We suggest that the division of labor evolves to exploit comparative advantage between young and old adults in fertility, childcare and foraging. Eventually the evolving division of labor reaches a limit when the grandmother's fertility reaches zero (menopause). Continuing, it may hit another limit when the grandmother's foraging time has been reduced to her subsistence needs. Further specialization can occur only with food transfers to the grandmother, enabling her to reduce her foraging time to concentrate on additional childcare. We prove that this outcome can arise only after menopause has evolved. We describe the conditions necessary for both group selection (comparative steady state reproductive fitness) and individual selection (successful invasion by a mutation), and interpret these conditions in terms of comparative advantages. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Previous studies of parent–child reciprocity have focused either on the long term (generalized exchange over the life course) or on the short term (concurrent exchange in later life). The purpose of this research was to investigate the linkage between both temporal patterns of reciprocity within an integrative conceptual framework. We assessed whether long-term and short-term reciprocity operated as interdependent mechanisms that initially selected and subsequently relieved intergenerational caregiving relationships. We used data from the Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old study (AHEAD) provided by frail, single-living parents of at least two children (N =1010 respondents comprising 3768 parent–child dyads). Fixed-effects conditional logit models estimated between-sibling differences in assistance provided to parents, measured by instrumental help (i.e., assistance with IADLs) and hands-on care (i.e., assistance with ADLs). Key predictors were two measures of financial transfers given to children referring to longer and shorter recall periods. Receiving earlier and current financial transfers increased adult children's propensity to support their parents in later life. The effect of earlier transfers pertained to help rather than care whereas the reverse was true for the effect of current transfers. We found no evidence for a linkage between long-term and short-term reciprocity. Overall, the results indicate that adult children might balance long-term support accounts relative to their siblings, suggesting an intra-generational orientation on equity. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In some vertebrates, offspring help their parents produce additional offspring. Often individuals of one sex are more likely to become “helpers at the nest”. We analyze how such sex-biased offspring helping can influence sex-ratio evolution. It is essential to account for age-structure because the sex ratios of early broods influence how much help is available for later broods; previous authors have not correctly accounted for this fact. When each female produces the same sex ratio in all broods (as assumed in all previous analyses of sex-biased helping), the optimal investment strategy is biased towards the more-helpful sex. When a female has facultative control over the sex ratio in each brood and each helper of a given sex increases the resource available for offspring production by a fixed amount, the optimal strategy is to produce only the more-helpful sex in early broods and only the less-helpful sex in later broods. When there are nonlinear returns from helping, i.e., each helper increases the amount of resource available for reproduction by an amount dependent upon the number of helpers, the optimal strategy is to maximize resource accrual from helping in early broods (which may involve the production of both sexes) and then switch to the exclusive production of the less-helpful sex in later broods. The population sex ratio is biased towards the more-helpful sex regardless of whether the sex ratio is fixed or age-dependent. When fitness returns from helping exhibit environmental patchiness, females are selected to produce only males on some patches and only females on others, and the population sex ratio may be biased in either direction. We discuss our results in light of empirical information on offspring helping, and we show via meta-analysis that there is no support for the claim of Griffin et al. [Griffin, A.S., Sheldon, B.C., West, S.A., 2005. Cooperative breeders adjust offspring sex ratios to produce helpful helpers. Amer. Nat. 166, 628–632] that parents produce more of the helpful sex when that sex is rare or absent. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]