Micro-Household Human Capital Investment Decisions and a Simulation Study from the Intergenerational Conflict Perspective

Qiling Lu and Jing Hua ()
Additional contact information
Qiling Lu: College of Economics and Management, Ningxia University, Yinchuan 750021, China
Jing Hua: College of Economics and Management, Ningxia University, Yinchuan 750021, China

IJERPH, 2023, vol. 20, issue 3, 1-21

Abstract: Education is highly valued in Asian families. However, as family members age, competition for intra-family resources affects children’s actualization in the family, which impacts the family’s future capital. However, most existing studies have interpreted the family’s intergenerational conflicts in terms of care services for older adults, and few have analyzed and simulated intra-family competition based on the intergenerational conflict. This study introduces a multi-agent simulation approach to observe micro-households’ educational investment choices under the dual pressures of retirement and childcare. This measure captures households’ investment choices and provides a decision basis for given households. Using data from the China Family Panel Study for 2014, 2016, and 2018, we explore the impact of these dual pressures on household educational expenditures and their differences across urban and rural areas, household aging, and income samples. We also simulated the micro-households’ investment choices under these dual pressures to observe that these pressures reduce investments in educational human capital in these “sandwich-like” households. The simulation results suggest that households with high childcare stress invest more in education than those with a high retirement burden. Moreover, income growth can mitigate the dual stress “crowding-out” effect on education, which is most pronounced in low-income, high childcare-stress households.

Keywords: population aging; family educational investment; multi-agent simulation; childcare burden; crowding-out effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/3/1696/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/3/1696/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:20:y:2023:i:3:p:1696-:d:1038776

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().