School of Economics, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK.
School of Economics, University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China.
Health Econ. 2024 Nov;33(11):2645-2670. doi: 10.1002/hec.4887. Epub 2024 Aug 13.
Using three waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, this paper examines whether financial transfers from adult children to elderly parents affect the latter's mental health. Both OLS and instrumental variable (IV) estimates show that financial transfers significantly attenuate depressive symptoms of elderly individuals, with a much larger size of the IV estimates. We also examine the income and cultural channels through which intergenerational transfers work and further discuss the explanatory powers of these two channels through a decomposition analysis. The results suggest the cultural channel accounts for a larger proportion of the financial transfer effect. This means that the unique beneficial impact of intergenerational financial transfers on the mental health of older adults cannot be fully substituted in the foreseeable future.
本文利用中国健康与养老追踪调查的三波数据，考察了成年子女向老年父母的经济转移是否会影响后者的心理健康。OLS 和工具变量（IV）估计都表明，经济转移显著减轻了老年人的抑郁症状，且 IV 估计的影响更大。我们还检验了代际转移发挥作用的收入和文化渠道，并通过分解分析进一步讨论了这两个渠道的解释力。结果表明，文化渠道占经济转移效应的比例更大。这意味着代际经济转移对老年人心理健康的独特有益影响在可预见的未来无法被完全替代。
