Volume 30, Number 5 1995
McGarry, Kathleen, and Robert F. Schoeni. 1995. "Transfer Behavior in the Health and Retirement Study: Measurement and the Redistribution of Resources Within the Family." Journal of Human Resources 30(5):S184-S226.
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 greater financial assistance to their less well off children than to their children with higher incomes. Financial transfers to the 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 the other survey data demonstrates that the HRS is potentially quite useful for research on transfer behavior.
Kathleen McGarry is an assistant professor of economics at the University of California-Los Angeles and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Robert Schoeni is an associate economist at RAND. The authors would like to thank Don Cox, Janet Currie, Tom Dunn, Michael Hurd, Lee Lillard, Jim Smith, Duncan Thomas, and Bob Willis for comments, the University of Michigan and the National Institute on Aging for financial support, and Nancy Cole for research assistance. The data used in this article are from the alpha release of the HRS.
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X