The More Boys The Merrier? The Impacts Of Siblings And Gender On Reciprocal Transfers

Based on the data "China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study" data, this paper examines the effects of number and order of adult children on their reciprocal transfer to their parents. The innovation of this paper is that we emphasize the Chinese unique concept-"seniority order". To be more specific, we suppose that the reciprocal transfer behavior may be affected by the birth order. In addition, this paper implements a new instrumental variable strategy based on the sex composition of the children. To be more precise, the children that was born already can be regarded as exogenous, thus we only consider the endogeneity of the younger ones.The research results show that if we do not consider the endogenous problem, the impact of the siblings number on the possibility of my reciprocal transfer is insignificant, however, I will be likely to give parents more financial support as the number of elder siblings increases under the instrumental variable method. This shows that there may be the mutual supervision mechanism among siblings. Further, the amount of my financial support would decrease with the increase of the sibling number. It reflects that there are also likely to be "free-rider" among siblings. This suggests that the more children would not guarantee the financial support for old-age parentsIn addition, we check the impact of gender on the reciprocal transfer behavior--the reciprocal transfer of sons is not better than the daughters’. On the contrary, many indicators reflects that the daughter would offer more financial support to their parents than the son. It also shows the traditional concept "raising sons for help in old age" needs to be amended. The differences between gender are diminishing gradually in terms of intergenerational support and the importance of daughter in providing financial support is rising with the time.