Money and time: what would you give back to me? Reciprocity between children and their elderly parents in Europe
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Money and time: what would you give back to me? Reciprocity between children and their elderly parents in Europe Fernanda Mazzotta1 · Lavinia Parisi1 Received: 24 October 2018 / Accepted: 16 April 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) (2004, 2006, 2011, 2013 and 2015), we analyse the determinants of adult children’s transfers of money and time to their parents. Specifically, we focus on reciprocity: analysing resource transfers, in term of both time (i.e., informal care) and money (i.e., financial transfers), helps us understand how parent-to-child transfers may influence the probability of child-to-parent transfers. A multivariate probit model for 10 EU countries is used to simultaneously estimate the probabilities that informal care or financial transfers will be given by children to their parents and, conversely, by parents to their children. Using the longitudinal structure of the data, we consider both concurrent and intertemporal reciprocity. The evidence for reciprocity is different based on the type of transfer: we do not find evidence of reciprocity for time transfers (informal care provided to parents) except in the case of sons, for which a positive link between informal care given to parents and current financial transfers received from parents emerges. In contrast, we find a positive effect of parent-tochild transfers (both time and money) on the probability of child-to-parent financial transfers. Keywords Informal care · Time transfers · Money Transfers · Reciprocity · Responsibility JEL classification D10 · I10 · D64 · J14 Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s4088 8-020-00181-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Fernanda Mazzotta [email protected] Lavinia Parisi [email protected] 1
Department of Economics and Statistics, CELPE, University of Salerno, Via Giovanni Paolo II, 132, 84084 Fisciano, SA, Italy
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Economia Politica
1 Introduction Studies on intergenerational resource transfers between elderly parents and their adult children have concentrated their attention on three currencies of transfers: space (co-residence), money (gifts, financial support) and time (time-help, caregiving). This paper focuses on the latter two (i.e., money and time1); in particular, it documents the determinants of adult children’s financial and time transfers to their elderly parents by simultaneously considering the effect of transfers of money and time from parents to their children (i.e., the same unobserved characteristics may affect the probabilities of giving and receiving transfers of both money and time). We emphasize the effect of reciprocity in shaping giving behaviour. A number of hypotheses have been advanced concerning the motivation for transfers within families, and consequently, different theoretical models have been analysed (Lillard and Willis 1997; Silverstein et al. 2002; R
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