Rustication and Giving to Parents: The Twins Experiment in China
2018/05/22
研討會日期 : 2018-05-22
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Hongliang Zhang
主持人 : Professor Kamhon Kan
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Professor Zhang received his Ph.D. in Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009. He is currently an Associate Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. His research fields are Economics of Education, Family and Demographic Economics, and Urban Economics.
演講摘要 : In the mass rustication movement of sending urban youths to the countryside during China's Cultural Revolution, many families with multiple age-eligible children were forced to choose whom to send down. We exploit this rare social experiment and employ data on urban twins in China to investigate the effect of the rustication experience on children's giving to parents at adulthood. We find that the send-down children are less likely to make a financial transfer to parents, and even if they do, they tend to transfer less. While children's transfers to parents are jointly determined by their earnings and altruism preference, both of which could be correlated with the rustication experience, we rule out earnings differences or altruism endowment differences as the driving force for the send-down children's fewer transfers to parents, leaving the adverse effect of the rustication experience on children's altruism preference toward parents as the only explanation.
