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

Hongliang Zhang, Junsen Zhang and Ning Zhang

No 991, Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: 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-sage support to parents, which could work through both pure altruism and warm glow.

Date: 2022-12-06
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