The Impact Of The Number Of Children On The Savings Of Middle-aged And Elderly People

China is in an aging society for many years.With the decline of fertility rate,the problem of old-age care for the elderly has become increasingly serious.The reduction in the number of children may have two opposite effects: on the one hand,the model of “nurturing children and preventing old age” is challenged,and middleaged and elderly people will turn to increase their savings in order to be able to spend their old age.On the other hand,if the middle-aged and the elderly are for the purpose of bequest or increasing the competitiveness of the child in the marriage market,then the savings will decrease.This paper uses the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study(CHARLS)and Harmonized CHARLS data to estimate the impact of the number of children on the savings of middle-aged and elderly people.This paper uses the number of children who have died as a tool variable to solve the endogeneity problem.The propensity score matching is performed before the regression,so that the systematic deviation is reduced.In addition,according to the definition that the income that is not completely consumed in the current period is the savings,the savings in this paper refer not only to bank deposits,financial assets and commercial assets,but also include bride price and wedding house.This article includes six chapters.The first chapter is the introduction;the second chapter summarizes the theory of birth and savings,and reviews the related research of scholars in the past;the third chapter introduces the research design and related model setting;the fourth chapter descriptive statistics and balance test of the data;The five chapters conduct empirical research on the number of children from the two dimensions of the total sample and the sub-sample.The sixth chapter is the conclusion and policy recommendations.The study finds that the middle-aged and elderly people in our country have little savings for their old-age care.The main motivation is for the children,because nearly three-quarters of the savings pay for the bride's wedding ceremony and wedding house.The empirical results show that the number of children has a significant positive correlation with the savings of middle-aged and elderly people,that is,as the number of children increases,the savings of middle-aged and elderly people also increase.The savings of middle-aged and elderly people with different marital status are different.Although the number of children has the same influence on married and widowed middle-aged and elderly people,the degree varies greatly.The number of children affects the widowed group less than half of the family where both husband and wife are alive.Further dividing the data according to the mother's birth year,it is found that the later the mother is born,the greater the positive influence of the number of children on the savings.In addition,the results of this paper also show that the bequest motivation of saving may be presented in different ways in our country.Because most parents don't wait until after death to give savings to their children,but instead transfer the intergenerational wealth when the child gets married.