Suchergebnisse

The chapters of this dissertation examine transfers between generations across three distinct contexts: a potential role for informal care in U.S. long-term care policy (Chapter 1), the effect of caregiving on bequests (Chapter 2), and making inferences about intra-household allocations using data on intergenerational transfers (Chapter 3).The first chapter poses the question: how can government policy leverage family caregiving to make Medicaid financing of long-term care more sustainable without compromising the well-being of elderly beneficiaries and their families? This question is addressed using a partial equilibrium life-cycle model augmented with a repeated game played between an elderly parent and her adult child over long-term care and living arrangements. The results indicate that policies which either expand access to consumer-directed home care or provide direct financial compensation to caregivers can result in a substantial reduction in the use of institutional care, an increase in informal caregiving, and a decrease in government expenditures.The second chapter is one of the first studies to examine bequest patterns and their determinants using data on actual bequests from a large and approximately representative, longitudinal survey of the U.S. population over age 50. The results indicate that caregiving from and co-residence with adult children are important predictors of the division of assets among children, with child caregivers receiving larger bequests than non-caregivers. The effects are strongest for bequests of housing assets. The salience of housing assets is further supported by evidence of a relationship between ownership of housing assets and the receipt of informal care from children near the end-of-life.The third chapter utilizes a novel source of variation, intergenerational financial transfers from parents to children, to recover the intra-household allocation of resources (the "sharing rule") in a collective model of household behavior. The identifying assumption is that financial transfers from a household to, for instance, the wife's own children (the stepchildren of her husband) can be regarded as the private consumption (an "assignable" good) of the wife. The results indicate that married women receive roughly half of household resources and that an increase in a wife's wage increases her share of household income.

Abstract.  In this paper we assemble a measure of international relative prices to gauge the average amount by which prices in China and the USA differ from the prices of their trading partners. Our estimated weighted average of relative prices for China and the USA are the first to use the significantly revised purchasing power parities embodied in the price data from the World Bank's World Development Indicators. Our analysis reveals several findings of interest. First, interactions between the structure of trade and the levels of relative prices are sufficiently important to induce divergences between the weighted average of relative prices and conventional real effective exchange‐rate indexes. Second, revisions embodied in World Development Indicators price data generally lower the estimate of US international relative prices. Third, net exports are inversely related to the estimate of US international relative price, but, for China, the correlation is positive. Estimating this correlation for other countries reveals no systematic pattern related to the level of development alone. Fourth, unlike previous work, using our price measures we find that an increase in US prices relative to Chinese prices raises the share of China's exports to the USA. Finally, there is a distinct possibility of eliminating the long‐standing differential in income elasticities of US trade in empirical applications.