 Childhood Send-Down Experience and Old-Age Support to Parents: The Twins Experiment in ChinaHongliang Zhang, Junsen Zhang and Ning Zhang Journal of the European Economic Association, 2023, vol. 21, issue 4, 1647-1685 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-age support to parents, which could work through both pure altruism and warm glow. Date: 2023 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jeurec:v:21:y:2023:i:4:p:1647-1685. Access Statistics for this article Journal of the European Economic Association is currently edited by Romain Wacziarg More articles in Journal of the European Economic Association from European Economic Association |
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