The schooling repayment hypothesis for private transfers: evidence from the PROGRESA/Oportunidades experiment

Carlos Chiapa () and Laura Juarez

Review of Economics of the Household, 2016, vol. 14, issue 4, No 3, 828 pages

Abstract: Abstract The schooling repayment hypothesis for private transfers predicts a positive relationship between the amount of parental investment in children’s education and the amount that adult children transfer to their parents. We provide evidence on the repayment motive using data from the Mexican conditional cash transfer program PROGRESA/Oportunidades (PO). PO pays a transfer to parents for sending their children to school. Thus, if private transfers from adult children to parents are in part repayment for parental schooling investments made in the past, then PO should decrease these transfers—parents were already exogenously compensated by the government for sending their kids to school and not to work. Exploiting the exogenous variation in the amount of cash transfers a household receives from PO for sending its children to school, we compare the private transfers received in 2007 by parental households who had children 0–16 in 1997 and started receiving the programs’ benefits in 1998 with the transfers received by similar parental households who started receiving benefits in 1999. Results suggest a repayment motive exists. That is, PO is causing adult children to transfer less resources to their parents.

Keywords: Parental schooling investments; Schooling repayment hypothesis; Intergenerational transfers; PROGRESA/Oportunidades (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D19 J18 J19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11150-015-9303-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The schooling repayment hypothesis for private transfers:Evidence from the PROGRESA/Oportunidades experiment (2012)
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:kap:reveho:v:14:y:2016:i:4:d:10.1007_s11150-015-9303-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11150/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11150-015-9303-z

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economics of the Household is currently edited by Shoshana Grossbard

More articles in Review of Economics of the Household from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().