The Impacts Of The Number Of Children On Intergenerational Transmission

With the increasing proportion of elderly population and the inadequate pensionmechanism in our country, more and more old people can’t get full pension support. Thetraditional family support is still an important form of old-age care, especially for thosewhere social support can’t cover. The number of children is a key factor for familysupport, compared with the one-child families the old man in large family may beobtained more support from more children. However, as the implementation of familyplanning makes the family size decreases and the strengthening of the liquidity of labormarket makes space distance enlargement between the children and parents lead thetraditional family pension cannot last. The adjustment of family planning policy makefamilies can choose to have more children, a larger family size may change the currentpension situation.This paper studied the relationship between the number of children and the parents’monetary support from children by using CHARLS2011data. As the endogenous ofnumber of children may exist, we choose the family planning policy for instrumental ofthe number of children. The results showed that, as increasing the number of childrenwould increase the possibility of parents’ monetary support from children, an additionalchild will increase more than6%possibility of monetary support, and the amount ofmonetary support will increase about60%. We also found that children’s education levelhad influence on the support but only when the children get university diploma hadsignificant effect, so the return of education might have a gradient distribution; livingarrangement of parents was an important factors affecting the support, when the parentsliving with a child will significantly reduce the monetary support of other children.Parents’ age, physical condition will affect the support too. As the difference of familystructure between urban and rural areas, the rural area old people rely more on theirchildren, the number of children had significant effect on the transfer; but in the urbanarea, old people had sufficient government pension or other social support, so thenumber of children seems less significant.