Intergenerational transfers in China: What are the patterns of the transfers and when do the transfers occur?

Abstract

China's social safety net is still underdeveloped, hence family support in the form of intergenerational transfers often serves as a substitute for the public transfer system. Using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, this paper finds that both upstream inter-vivos transfers (from children to parents) and downstream inter-vivos transfers (from parents to children) are prevalent in urban China. Moreover, the relative income status of the parent and children has an impact on inter-vivos transfers. To investigate what economic factors generate the observed patterns of inter-vivos transfers, this paper adopts a general equilibrium life-cycle model in which overlapping generations are altruistically linked and calibrates the model to match data from urban China. Counterfactual experiments of removing one source of economic risk or modifying the social security replacement rate from the baseline model at a time reveal that intergenerational transfers mainly serve as informal insurance against the income risk of the children.