Childhood Send-Down Experience and Old-Age Support to Parents: The Twins Experiment in China
Journal of the European Economic Association · 2023 · Hongliang Zhang、Junsen Zhang、Ning Zhang
中文摘要
在中国 “文化大革命” 期间将城市青年下放到农村的大规模运动中， 许多有多个符合年龄条件的子女的家庭被迫在兄弟姐妹之间做出下乡选择。我们利用这一罕见的社会实验， 并使用中国城市双胞胎数据， 研究童年下乡经历对子女向父母提供养老支持的影响。我们发现， 与留在城市中的双胞胎兄弟姐妹相比， 下乡者向父母进行货币转移的可能性更低， 且转移金额也趋于更少。我们表明， 下乡者较差的转移行为并非源于收入劣势， 也不是家庭下乡选择在子女利他禀赋上的选择性所致。在排除收入渠道和选择渠道的解释之后， 我们认为下乡者较差的转移行为是由童年下乡经历对子女向父母提供养老支持意愿的不利影响所驱动， 这种影响既可能通过纯粹利他主义， 也可能通过温情效应 (warm glow) 起作用。
Abstract
Abstract In the mass movement of sending urban youth to the countryside during China’s Cultural Revolution, many families with multiple age-eligible children were forced to make a send-down choice among the siblings. We exploit this rare social experiment and employ data on urban twins in China to investigate the effect of childhood send-down experience on children’s old-age support to parents. We find that compared with their twin siblings who had stayed in the city, send-downs were less likely to make a monetary transfer to parents and also tended to transfer less. We show that the inferior transfer behavior of send-downs was not due to any income disadvantage or selection of family’s send-down choice in terms of children’s altruism endowment. After ruling out the income and selection channel explanations, we posit that the inferior transfer behavior of send-downs is driven by the adverse effect of childhood send-down experience on children’s willingness to provide old-age support to parents, which could work through both pure altruism and warm glow.