Motivation of Parent-Child Co-residence Behavior:Evidenee from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study

This paper examines the motivations of parent-child co-residence behavior in China using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study.We test three possible motives:social norms,self-interest and altruism.We find that social norms play an important role in household co-residence beha...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in中国与世界经济:英文版 Vol. 27; no. 2; pp. 66 - 85
Main Authors Yijie Wang, Wenkai Sun, Xianghong Wang
Format Journal Article
LanguageChinese
Published 中国社会科学院世界经济与政治研究所 01.04.2019
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ISSN1671-2234

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Summary:This paper examines the motivations of parent-child co-residence behavior in China using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study.We test three possible motives:social norms,self-interest and altruism.We find that social norms play an important role in household co-residence behavior,showing that the belief that"sons take care of parents"is strong,and children in different birth orders take different responsibilities.Taking the one-child policy as a natural experiment,we compared co-residence behavior between only-child and multi-child families.This allowed us to test whether children in multi-child families with wealthier parents more often coreside in order to compete for a bequest.We find that parents'wealth is more appealing to children in multi-child families.The results support the life cycle theory that coresidence decisions are motivated by self-interest.We also find some evidence of altruism when parents and children make co-residence decisions.These findings provide some insights
ISSN:1671-2234