THE EFFECTS OF CHILDREN'S GENDER COMPOSITION ON FILIAL PIETY AND OLD-AGE SUPPORT

摘要

Do parents forge children's preference for old-age support? Becker (1993) conjectures that the inculcation of filial piety increases parents' investment in children's human capital. We provide the first empirical evidence on parents' instilling of filial piety in children, by combining the natural experiment of twins with China's One-Child Policy to obtain exogenous variations in children's gender composition. Among the different models of filial-piety inculcation, our empirical results favour a Beckerian model of altruism inculcation in which parents solicit support from the child with a higher earnings endowment.