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Transfer Behavior in the Health and Retirement Study: Measurement and the Redistribution of Resources within the Family
Abstract
Recent work by a number of economists has opened a debate about the role played by intergenerational transfers. Using the new Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we are better able to address the issues involved. Contrary to the current literature on bequests, we do not find that parents give transfers equally to all children. Rather, we find that in the case of inter-vivos transfers, respondents give greaterfinancial assistance to their less well off children than to their children with higher incomes. Financial transfers to elderly parents are also found to be negatively related to the (potential) recipient's income. These results hold both for the incidence of transfers and for the amounts. In addition, we allow for unobserved differences across families by estimating fixed effect models and find our results to be robust to these specifications. A comparison of the HRS transfer data to other survey data demonstrates that the HRS is potentially quite useful for research on transfer behavior.
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Cited by
Reciprocity in parent-child relations over the adult life course.
Silverstein, M., Conroy, S. J., Wang, H., Giarrusso, R., & Bengtson, V. L. (2002) · The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences · doi:10.1093/geronb/57.1.s3 · Cited by 460
Wealth and Stratification Processes
Spilerman, S. (2000) · Annual Review of Sociology · doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.497 · Cited by 457
Swartz, T. T. (2009) · Annual Review of Sociology · doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.34.040507.134615 · Cited by 448
Selection of Children To Provide Care: The Effect of Earlier Parental Transfers
Henretta, J. C., Hill, M. S., Li, W., Soldo, B. J., & Wolf, D. A. (1997) · The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences · doi:10.1093/geronb/52b.special_issue.110 · Cited by 202
Growing Wealth Gaps in Education
Pfeffer, F. T. (2018) · Demography · doi:10.1007/s13524-018-0666-7 · Cited by 178
Metadata
- Authors
- McGarry, K., & Schoeni, R. F.
- Venue
- The Journal of Human Resources
- Publisher
- JSTOR
- Published
- 1995
- Volume
- 30
- Pages
- S184
- ISSN
- 0022-166X (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W203624885
- Cited by
- 382
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 23.11
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Transfer Behavior in the Health and Retirement Study: Measurement and the Redistribution of Resources within the Family. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/146283
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- McGarry, K., & Schoeni, R. F. (1995). Transfer Behavior in the Health and Retirement Study: Measurement and the Redistribution of Resources within the Family. The Journal of Human Resources. https://doi.org/10.2307/146283
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