Grandfathers and Grandsons: Social Security Expansion and Child Health in China

Jinyang Yang and Xi Chen

Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2025, vol. 73, issue 4, 1881 - 1921

Abstract: We examine the multigenerational association of a nationwide social pension program in China, the New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS). The NRPS was rolled out on full scale in 2012, and rural enrollees over age 60 are eligible to receive an average of 102 yuan noncontributory monthly pension. We leverage age eligibility and variations in pension receipt to identify the intergenerational associations between the NRPS and health among grandchildren. We find that the NRPS substantially increases child weight without impacting height. Overall, the child body mass index z-score increases by 0.87, which is largely driven by grandfathers’ pension receipt raising rates of overweight and obesity among grandsons. Among the potential mechanisms, our findings are more plausibly explained by a mixture of income increase, knowledge bias of coresiding grandparents on childcare, and son preference. Potential biases from differential reporting of primary caregivers and epigenetic transmissions unlikely drive our findings.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/733610 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/733610 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:ecdecc:doi:10.1086/733610

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development and Cultural Change from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().