Old-Age Pension and Extended Families: How is Adult Children's Internal Migration Affected?

32 Pages Posted: 7 Jul 2016

See all articles by Xi Chen

Xi Chen

Yale School of Public Health - Department of Health Policy and Management; Yale University - Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies

Abstract

This paper makes use of the most recent social pension reform in rural China to examine whether receipt of the pension payment equips adult children of pensioners to migrate. Employing a regression discontinuity (hereafter RD) design to a primary longitudinal survey, this paper overcomes challenges in the literature that households eligible for pension payment might be systematically different from ineligible households and that it is difficult to separate the effect of pension from that of age or cohort heterogeneity. Around the pension eligibility age cut-off, results reveal large and significant increase among adult sons (but not daughters) to migrate out of their home county. Meanwhile, adult children are more likely to migrate out if their parents are healthy. Our Fuzzy RD estimations survive a standard set of key placebo tests and robustness checks.

Keywords: rural pension, RD Design, adult children, migration

JEL Classification: H55, I38, J14, J22

Suggested Citation

Chen, Xi, Old-Age Pension and Extended Families: How is Adult Children's Internal Migration Affected?. IZA Discussion Paper No. 10016, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2803848 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2803848

Xi Chen (Contact Author)

Yale School of Public Health - Department of Health Policy and Management ( email )

60 College St
New Haven, CT 06520
United States

Yale University - Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies ( email )

77 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06520
United States

HOME PAGE: http://isps.yale.edu/team/xi-chen

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