Pension Coverage for Parents and Educational Investment in Children: Evidence from Urban China

Ren Mu () and Yang Du ()
Additional contact information
Yang Du: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

No 6797, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: When social security is established to provide pensions to parents, their reliance upon children for future financial support decreases; and their need to save for retirement also falls. We use the expansion of pension coverage from the state sector to the non-state sector in urban China as a quasi-experiment to analyze the intergenerational impact of social security on educational investments in children. With a difference-in-differences framework, we find a significant increase in the total education expenditure attributable to pension expansion. The results are unlikely to be driven by trends in medical insurance, wages, bonus income, and housing values. They are robust to the inclusion of a large set of control variables and to different specifications, including one based on the instrumental variable method.

Keywords: urban; pension; education expenditure; gender difference; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 J24 J26 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2012-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-cna, nep-dem, nep-lab, nep-lma and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published in: World Bank Economic Review, 2017, 31(2), 483-503.

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Related works:
Journal Article: Pension Coverage for Parents and Educational Investment in Children: Evidence from Urban China (2017)
Working Paper: Pension coverage for parents and educational investment in children: evidence from urban China (2015)
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