Cultural Transmission, Property Rights, and Treatment of the Elderly

We study how property rights over land, capital, and output interact with cul-tural transmission to determine the welfare of the elderly. In our model, respect for the elderly emerges endogenously: adults transmit norms of care to children, which children later reciprocate when they become adults. We compare regimes of insecure rights over produced goods with secure rights over productive resources, showing that both can sustain elderly well-being through distinct channels. By distinguishing be-tween property rights to outputs and to inputs—and further between fixed and created resources—we uncover nonlinear interactions between cultural transmission, property institutions, and production technologies, and a general curvilinear pattern where the elderly are relatively better off compared to the middle-aged in either an insecure prop-erty right (i.e., common resources) regime or a high productive property rights regime relative to intermediate cases. Ethnographic evidence illustrates these mechanisms and helps explain cross-societal variation in elderly support. The model also demonstrates how demographic, technological, and policy changes can alter the conditions for elderly well-being across stages of development.