社会保障的长期代际效应
Long-Run Intergenerational Effects of Social Security
NBER Working Papers · 2026 · [{"name": "Daniel K. Fetter", "affiliation": []}, {"name": "Lee M. Lockwood", "affiliation": []}, {"name": "Paul Mohnen", "affiliation": []}]
中文摘要
无论历史上还是当今，对年迈父母的支持大多采取需要近距离接触的实物转移形式，例如住房和照料。如果社会保障替代了此类支持，就可以放松对受助者子女居住和工作地点的约束。我们利用同一职业内部、跨行业的社保覆盖率差异，以及一个将父母与其子女晚年结果相连接的新数据集，考察了早期社会保障项目的长期代际效应。我们发现，父母预测社保覆盖率更高的儿子，晚年时搬离童年住所的距离更远、收入更高，且居住在更好的社区。我们没有在女儿身上发现此类效应，她们往往提供更不易被社会保障替代的支持形式。对于普通家庭而言，这些收益大大超过了相应的社会保障福利，向匹配度更高的劳动力市场迁移很可能是关键驱动因素。我们提出，早期计划使家庭得以实现那些被延后、不确定且难以通过合约保障的迁移收益。
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.