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Hongliang Zhang, Junsen Zhang, Ning Zhang, Childhood Send-Down Experience and Old-Age Support to Parents: The Twins Experiment in China, Journal of the European Economic Association, Volume 21, Issue 4, August 2023, Pages 1647–1685, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvad011
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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.
