Author: Rufei Guo, Junsen Zhang

Abstract: Do parents forge children's preference for old-age support? Becker (1993) conjectures that the inculcation of filial piety increases parents' investment in children's human capital. We provide the first empirical evidence on parents' instilling of filial piety in children, by combining the natural experiment of twins with China's One-Child Policy to obtain exogenous variations in children's gender composition. Among the different models of filial-piety inculcation, our empirical results favour a Beckerian model of altruism inculcation in which solicit parents support from the child with a higher earnings endowment.

Keywords: preference inculcation; filial piety; children’s gender composition

This article was published online in Economic Journal in February 2020, and Rufei Guo is the first author of this article. Economic Journal, founded in 1891, is a comprehensive economics journal sponsored by the Royal Society of Economics, and is an English A-level award journal of our college.

Paper Link: https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueaa027