Alternative boomerang kids, intergenerational co-residence, and maternal labor supply

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Alternative boomerang kids, intergenerational co-residence, and maternal labor supply Lusi Liao1 Sasiwimon Warunsiri Paweenawat ●

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Received: 16 November 2019 / Accepted: 28 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020

Abstract This study investigates the boomerang phenomenon among adult children in Thailand. We estimate the effect of having children on co-residence between parents and adult children using Socio-Economic Survey panel data. We find that adult children who have moved out tend to move back in with their parents after having children to save time and money on childcare. The presence of young children increases the likelihood of intergenerational co-residence by over 30%. This study is the first to provide empirical evidence of alternative boomerang kids in an Asian context, which is distinctive compared with Western countries. The relationship between intergenerational co-residence and the maternal labor supply is also examined using the instrumental variable approach based on the cross-sectional Labor Force Survey, which has data covering over 30 years. Our results show that co-residence increases the female labor supply by 21% and also extend women’s working hours by 10 hours. Keywords Boomerang kids Intergenerational co-residence Informal childcare Maternal labor supply Asia Thailand ●









JEL code D10 J11 J12 J13 J21 J22 C23 C26 ●













1 Introduction In the last decade, an unprecedented increase in young adults moving back in with their parents in some developed countries has attracted the attention of researchers and policy makers (Dettling and Hsu 2018; Kaplan 2012; Stone et al. 2012). There is growing interest in the study of “boomerang kids” in Western countries; these are

* Sasiwimon Warunsiri Paweenawat [email protected] 1

School of Economics, University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce, 126/1 Vibhavadee-Rangsit Rd., Dindaeng, Bangkok 10400, Thailand

L. Liao, S. W. Paweenawat

adult children who have lived on their own but make decision to move back home to co-reside with their parents again (Engelhardt et al. 2016, p. 2). The main explanation is that co-residence acts as a protective method that hedges the adult children from labor market uncertainty (Engelhardt et al. 2016; Kaplan 2009; Mykyta and Macartney 2012; Stone et al. 2014; Wiemers 2014). In Asian countries, with their different cultural backgrounds, living arrangements, and family concepts compared to Western countries, co-residence manifests in a different way. While most parents in developed countries do not live with their adult children, no matter whether they assist in taking care of their grandchildren or not (Posadas and Vidal-Fernández 2013), adult children co-residing with their parents has been a prevalent living pattern in Asia for a long time, where, in addition to grandparenting, adult children take care of their elderly parents under the tradition of filial piety and law (Maurer-Fazio et al. 2011). Population aging and changes in so