IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/nbr/nberch/11581.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

How Much Care Do the Aged Receive from Their Children? A Bimodal Picture of Contact and Assistance

In: The Economics of Aging

Author

Listed:
  • Laurence J. Kotlikoff
  • John N. Morris

Abstract

This paper presents some preliminary findings about contact between the aged and their children based on a new survey of the aged and their children, entitled The Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for the Aged-NBER (HRC-NBER) Child Survey. Data on extended families is quite limited. The HRC-NBER Child Survey represents one of the few attempts to collect economic and demographic data on the elderly and their children. While these data will be used in future,research to test structural models of the living arrangements, the purposes of the current paper are to describe the survey and to examine contact between the elderly and their children. While our findings are preliminary and will be updated and expanded as we receive more data, it appears that a significant minority of the elderly, many of whom need assistance with the activities of daily living, have either no children or have only limited contact with their children. Contact between children and the vulnerable elderly appears to be less than that between children and the nonvulnerable elderly, and the amount of contact between children and the institutionalized elderly seems the least of all. In addition, although many of the parents in our data are very poor, financial support from children to parents, other than in the form of shared housing, is uncommon. The impression given by these data is that many of the elderly are very well cared for by their children, while a significant minority either have no children or have no children who provide significant time or care. Some of the findings for this sample are striking: (1) over a fifth of the elderly have no children. (2) over one half of the elderly either do not have a daughter or do not have a daughter who lives within an hour of them. (3) over half of single elderly males and females and over two fifths of vulnerable single elderly males and females live completely alone. (4) of the elderly who have children, fewer than a quarter live with their children. (5) a
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Laurence J. Kotlikoff & John N. Morris, 1989. "How Much Care Do the Aged Receive from Their Children? A Bimodal Picture of Contact and Assistance," NBER Chapters,in: The Economics of Aging, pages 151-176 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberch:11581
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c11581.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Emanuela Cardia & Serena Ng, 1997. "How Important are Intergenerational Transfers of Time? A Macroeconomic Analysis," Boston College Working Papers in Economics 395, Boston College Department of Economics.
    2. Sarmistha Pal, 2004. "Do Children Act As Old Age Security in Rural India? Evidence from an Analysis of Elderly Living Arrangements," Labor and Demography 0405002, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 15 Oct 2004.
    3. Sarmistha Pal, 2006. "Elderly Health, Wealth and Co-residence with Adult Children in Rural India," CEDI Discussion Paper Series 06-09, Centre for Economic Development and Institutions(CEDI), Brunel University.
    4. Pal, Sarmistha, 2007. "Effects of Intergenerational Transfers on Elderly Coresidence with Adult Children: Evidence from Rural India," IZA Discussion Papers 2847, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    5. Axel Borsch-Supan & Laurence J. Kotlikoff & John N. Morris, 1988. "The Dynamics of Living Arrangements of the Elderly," NBER Working Papers 2787, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Kai A. Konrad & Harald Künemund & Kjell Erik Lommerud & Julio R. Robledo, 2002. "Geography of the Family," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(4), pages 981-998, September.
    7. Donald Cox & Oded Stark, 2007. "On the Demand for Grandchildren: Tied Transfers and the Demonstration Effect," Chapters,in: Handbook on the Economics of Happiness, chapter 18 Edward Elgar Publishing.
    8. Axel Borsch-Supan & Daniel L. McFadden & Reinhold Schnabel, 1996. "Living Arrangements: Health and Wealth Effects," NBER Chapters,in: Advances in the Economics of Aging, pages 193-216 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Axel Borsch-Supan & Vassilis Hajivassiliou & Laurence J. Kotlikoff, 1992. "Health, Children, and Elderly Living Arrangements: A Multiperiod-Multinomial Probit Model with Unobserved Heterogeneity and Autocorrelated Errors," NBER Chapters,in: Topics in the Economics of Aging, pages 79-108 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Yang-Ming Chang & Zijun Luo, 2015. "Endogenous division rules as a family constitution: strategic altruistic transfers and sibling competition," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 28(1), pages 173-194, January.
    11. Surkov, Alexander, 2009. "Пенсионная Реформа И Межпоколенческий Альтруизм В Моделях Экономической Динамики
      [Pension reform and intergenerational altruism in economic dynamics models]      ," MPRA Paper 27632, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    12. Laurence J. Kotlikoff & John N. Morris, 1990. "Why Don't the Elderly Live with Their Children? A New Look," NBER Chapters,in: Issues in the Economics of Aging, pages 149-172 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    13. Emanuela Cardia & Serena Ng, 2003. "Intergenerational Time Transfers and Childcare," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 6(2), pages 431-454, April.
    14. Van Houtven, Courtney Harold & Norton, Edward C., 2008. "Informal care and Medicare expenditures: Testing for heterogeneous treatment effects," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 27(1), pages 134-156, January.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberch:11581. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.