Portal Red Investigadores de Economía

Parental intervivos transfers to adult children occur in families across the income distribution. This paper documents and analyzes novel patterns of parental intervivos transfers that are informative to dynamic models of transfers. We sue longitudinal data on parental transfers from the 1996-2014 Health and Retirement Study to characterize the age profile of transfers, including the probability and the transfer amount (unconditional and conditional). We then follow the 1967-71 cohort to describe the frequency of transfers, the distribution of years between transfers, and the total transfers received during different age brackets. Last, we use a dynamic model of parental altruism to analyze the mechanisms generating the distinct transfer types observed in the data. We find that in addition to the cross-sectional patterns documented in the literature, parental altruism is essential to explain the novel dynamic facts on intervivos transfers from longitudinal data.

The Patterns of Parental Intervivos Transfers to Adult Children