社会保障的长期代际效应

中文摘要

无论在历史上还是当今，对年迈父母的赡养主要采取需要居住地点相近的实物转移形式，例如提供住房和照护。如果社会保障能够替代此类赡养，就可以放松对受益人子女居住和工作地点的约束。我们利用同一职业内部、不同行业间社会保障覆盖范围的差异，以及一个将父母与其子女晚年结果相匹配的新数据集，考察早期社会保障制度的长期代际效应。我们发现，父母预测覆盖程度较高的儿子迁居至离童年故居更远的地方，收入更高，晚年居住的社区也更好。我们未发现女儿存在此类效应；女儿往往提供较难由社会保障替代的赡养形式。对于一般家庭而言，这些收益大幅超过了相应的社会保障待遇，其中迁往匹配度更高的劳动力市场可能是一个关键驱动因素。我们认为，早期社会保障制度使家庭能够实现来自迁移的收益，而这些收益是滞后显现的、具有不确定性、且难以通过契约加以约定。

Abstract

Both historically and today, support of aging parents has largely taken the form of in-kind transfers that require physical proximity, such as housing and caregiving. If Social Security substitutes for such support, it can relax constraints on where recipients' children live and work. We investigate the long-run intergenerational effects of the early Social Security program, exploiting within-occupation, cross-industry differences in coverage and a new dataset linking parents to their children's later-life outcomes. We find that sons whose parents had greater predicted coverage moved farther from their childhood homes, earned more, and lived in better neighborhoods late in life. We find no such effects for daughters, who tended to provide forms of support less easily replaced by Social Security. The gains considerably exceeded the associated Social Security benefits for the average family, with migration to better-matched labor markets a likely key driver. We propose that the early program enabled families to realize gains from migration that were back-loaded, uncertain, and difficult to contract on.