‘More Children, More Happiness?’: New Evidence from Elderly Parents in China

Yanyan Gao and Zhaopeng Qu ()

No 366, GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO)

Abstract: In this paper, we test the conventional wisdom in developing countries of ‘more children, more happiness’ by exploiting the cohort and provincial variations of elderly parents exposed to the one-child policy in China. Using nationally representative survey data from the 2015 China Health and Retirement Longitude Survey, the results from both the ordinary least square and two-stage least square methods find that more children can enhance elderly parents’ subjective well-being (SWB) measured with either life satisfaction or depression mood. The effect is channelled by raising their satisfaction with children and receiving in-kind transfers from children. The heterogeneity analysis also shows that the effect of children on parents’ life satisfaction is heterogenous to sex composition, first-birth gender, and parents' age. Our study provides new causal evidence of the impact of fertility on elderly parents’ SWB from a developing economy.

Keywords: children; happiness; life satisfaction; elderly parents; depression; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I18 I31 J13 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-cna, nep-hap and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:glodps:366

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