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About text below the content, author: Yi Ling snow, Hainan University, Central University of Finance & Accounting (tax) science, communication mail: [email protected]
The author's previous article: ① How does the founder of synthetic control method use SCM as a demonstration? None of these prescribed actions can be missing! ②Quickly estimate the Poisson model with high-dimensional fixed effects. The calculation speed is really fast and it is practical!
Guo, Rufei, and Junsen Zhang. "The Effects of Children’s Gender Composition on Filial Piety and Old-Age Support." The Economic Journal (2020).
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. Amongst the different models of filial-piety inculcation, our empirical results favour a Beckerian model of altruism inculcation in which parents solicit support from the child with a higher earnings endowment.
1. Introduction and background
Will parents affect their children's preference for supporting the elderly? Although many developed countries adopt pension systems, most developing countries still rely on family members to provide pension support. Becker (1993) speculates that inculcating filial piety will increase parents' investment in their children's human capital. This paper combines the natural experiment of twins with China’s one-child policy to obtain exogenous variables of the gender composition of children. The latest data collected from Chinese twins is used to test the Beckerian model’s theoretical predictions on parent-child education. Each child’s expectation for the aged and the unique information of each child’s perceived intensity of preference education presents the empirical experience of parents instilling filial piety in their children for the first time.
The empirical results of this article are more inclined to support the Beckerian altruistic indoctrination model, that is, parents will seek support from children with higher income endowments. Under the test conditions that parents expect their sons to make more money than their daughters, the author has a verifiable hypothesis on the influence of the gender composition of children on filial piety and pension. Specifically, according to the theoretical implications, if the child has a brother instead of a sister, parents are unlikely to seek support from the child or instill filial piety into the child, especially when the child is a daughter. The author calls these cues the crowding-out effect of siblings' gender on filial piety and pension under gender asymmetry.
Consistent with the testable hypothesis of this article, the author discovered the gender asymmetric effect of sibling gender on support and filial piety. If the daughter has a brother instead of a sister, her parents (a) are 15% less likely to expect support from her in the case of financial difficulties in old age; (b) are less likely to live with her in old age by 18 %; In sharp contrast, if a son has a brother instead of a sister, then his parents may expect to receive support from him for the elderly, or expect to live with him when he is old, it is also possible that He instilled filial piety in his childhood. The results show that when two children provide elderly care services with the same efficiency, the parents rely on the two children to the same degree; but when one child provides elderly care services at a lower cost, the parents will choose a more efficient way of support.
2. Propose hypothesis
2.1 Only child
This theory predicts that parents are more likely to inculcate filial piety in their sons, and therefore receive more support for the elderly from their sons than from their daughters. This prediction is consistent with the tradition that Chinese parents rely mainly on their sons for their support (Cheung, 1972; Ebenstein and Leung, 2010; Deng and Zhang, 2015; Huang et al, 2017; Guo et al, 2019).
2.2
The thinking of the two-child only child model will continue to the two-child environment: parents are more likely to instill filial piety in their sons and seek support for the elderly, rather than their daughters. If the child’s net transfer drops to zero or negative, the parents stop instilling filial piety in the child. A male sibling is more likely to exclude the daughter's indoctrination of filial piety and prevent parents from seeking support from their daughters.
Then, this article puts forward the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 1 (Elderly support) If the child has a brother instead of a sister, then the probability of parents seeking retirement support from the child will be less or the same. The gender of siblings has a negative influence on parents' expectation of old-age care, and the negative influence of daughter is greater than that of son. Call Hypothesis 1 as the gender asymmetric crowding-out effect of sibling gender on parents' pension expectation.
Hypothesis 2 (Inculcation of filial piety) If the child has a brother instead of a sister, then the possibility of parents instilling filial piety in the child will be less or equal. The gender of siblings has a negative impact on parents instilling filial piety, and daughters have a greater negative impact on sons. Call Hypothesis 2 as the gender asymmetric crowding out effect of sibling gender on parents instilling filial piety.
Hypothesis 3 (Parenting Investment) Regardless of the gender composition of the child, parents will make the optimal investment for each child to maximize family income. The gender of the child’s siblings has no effect on the parent’s investment in the child.
- Data and Empirical Methods
3.1 The Chinese Twin Children's Survey
The data used in this study comes from the Chinese Twin Children's Survey (CCTS), which contains uniquely designed questions about support for the elderly and preference education. In each sample family, the parents and each child answered the questionnaire separately. One of the parents answers two questions, hoping to whom they can rely on when they are old.
Q1 When you are old, if you and your spouse are in financial difficulties, which child will you rely on for financial support? Please fill in the child's name or select (1), and all children will share the burden equally.
Q2When you are old, which child do you want to live with? Please fill in the child's name or choose (1) to live with each child in turn.
Score the frequency of instilling filial piety in each child. The score is on a five-point scale. The main question is:
Q3 When you were young, did your parents often tell you that filial piety is a virtue?
(1) Never, ( 2) Rarely, (3) Sometimes, (4) Usually, (5) Always.
A high score indicates frequent indoctrination.
3.2 Empirical Strategies
This paper uses a new empirical strategy to obtain exogenous variables of the gender composition of children to test the hypothesis. The author combines the two natural experiments of the incidence and gender composition of twins with the family planning policy (ie, China’s one-child policy) to obtain exogenous variables of the gender composition of siblings. The one-child policy strictly restricts extra births after twins are born, thereby eliminating confusing changes in the number of children, and it is unlikely that parents will choose the sex of twins to choose abortion.
The main data used in the study comes from the Chinese Twin Children's Survey (CCTS). Among the 877 samples in the 2013 survey, there were 334 families with male twins, 315 families with lesbian twins, and 228 families with heterosexual twins.
The average age of twins is 23, and only 61 families (6.96%) choose to continue childbirth after the twins are born. Therefore, the one-child policy has largely eliminated the chaotic changes in the size of the family after the birth of twins. The sex ratio of the twin sample of the research data is 1.04, which is close to the natural sex ratio. The balance of the sex ratio of twins shows that in the sample, the parents did not have sex-selective abortions for the twins.
In order to test the determinants of the sex composition of twins, the author estimated the polynomial Logit model by regression analysis on the type of twins, the city status of the family, the race of both parents, the education years of the parents, and the maternal age of the twins. The joint significance test of city status, parent race, and parent’s educational years (p-value = 0.47) cannot reject the null hypothesis that these variables cannot predict the sex composition of twins. The only statistically significant variable that predicts the occurrence of heterosexual twins is the mother’s age at birth. In the regression analysis, the maternal age at the birth of the twins was strictly controlled.
3.3 Summary statistics
According to Q1 and Q2 answered by parents described in section 3.1, the author generated two variables for each child's parents' expectation of support for the elderly. By using gender to summarize the characteristics of children, parents are about 22% more likely to receive financial support from their sons than their daughters, and are about 23% more likely to expect cohabitation with their sons than their daughters. The Q3 answered by each child reflects the method of instilling filial piety. If parents want to rely on their children or live with them when they are old, they are more likely to instill filial piety in their children.
CCTS also provides a five-point scale, which is scored according to the degree of indoctrination of friendship by each child: "Q4: In your childhood, how often did your parents tell you that brotherly love between brothers and sisters is A kind of virtue?" The inculcation of filial piety directly reflects the need for old-age care, while fraternity does not. Therefore, it is possible to test the influence of sibling gender on the different dimensions of preference instillation.
This article also summarizes the expectations and preferences of parents of different types of twins for their children's pension. Consistent with theory, 95.6% of parents with two sons want to rely on each son when they are financially difficult in old age, while only 76.7% of parents with two daughters want to rely on each daughter. If parents have a daughter and a son (heterosexual twins), the parents are more likely to rely on the son (92.4%) rather than the daughter (62.5%).
The theory in this article implies that parents should instill filial piety and expect children with higher income potential to receive old age support. The main empirical strategy is to examine the influence of sibling gender on parents’ expectation and preference instillation by comparing children of the same gender.
3.5 Regression analysis
4. Empirical results
4.1
The empirical results of the regression analysis of pension and filial piety are as follows: 
In Panel A, the dependent variable is an indicator variable. If parents want to rely on their children to obtain financial support in financial difficulties, this variable is equal to 1. In panel B, the dependent variable is an indicator variable. If the parent wants to live with the child, this variable is equal to 1. In panel C, the dependent variable is the frequency of instilling filial piety in childhood (five-point scale). Control variables include the child’s birth weight and year of birth; the degree of twins’ union and whether the family lives in an urban area; and the years of education, race, and year of birth of both parents. The author generates a separate dummy variable for the missing value of each control variable. The standard errors of twin-level clustering are in parentheses, p <0.01, p <0.05, and p <0.10.
4.1.1 The effect of sibling gender on parents' pension expectation The
(1) column in Panel A of Table 2 shows the estimation of formula (3) by the sub-sample without any control variables. With brothers instead of sisters, the likelihood of parents expecting to rely on their daughters financially is reduced by 14.2%. In column (2), all control variables are added. With brothers instead of sisters, the likelihood of parents expecting to be financially dependent on their daughters is reduced by 15.3%. Columns (3) and (4) use subsamples to report the estimates of formula (3). There are no control variables in column (3), and all control variables are added in column (4). Having brothers instead of sisters has no significant effect on parents’ expectations of their son’s financial dependence. Column (5) shows the estimated value of formula (4) without control variables. Having brothers instead of sisters reduced the parents’ expectation of financial dependence on their daughters by 17.5% compared to their expectations of their sons. Column (6) adds complete control variables. Having a brother instead of a sister reduced the parents’ expectation of financial dependence on their daughters by 17.1% compared to their expectations of their sons. The assumptions in Panel A in Table 2 are consistent with Assumption 1.
4.1.2 The influence of sibling gender on instilling filial piety
Panel C of Table 2 examines the influence of sibling gender on the inculcation of filial piety. Consistent with the results in Table 2, having brothers but not sisters will reduce daughters’ indoctrination of filial piety, with a standard deviation of 0.32 (column (2)). In contrast, having brothers but not sisters does not affect the indoctrination of filial piety in sons. Column (6) shows that the standard deviation of the difference effect of sibling gender on children's filial piety instillation is 0.36. The asymmetric squeeze-out effect of sibling gender on filial piety effectively supports Hypothesis 2.
4.2 Alternative dimensions of indoctrination: fraternity and parenting The
data in this article can also study the influence of siblings’ gender on alternative dimensions of filial piety inculcation preferences: fraternity (Yi, 2019) and parenting style (Doepke and Zilibotti, 2017). In the Chinese environment, the results of this article may be driven by the indoctrination of Confucianism, because Confucianism emphasizes filial piety, fraternity, and children's obedience to their parents.
In Panel A, the dependent variable is the frequency of instilling filial piety in childhood (five-point scale). In panel B, the dependent variable is the score of authoritarian parenting style obtained through factor analysis. In panel C, the dependent variable is the happiness score obtained through principal component analysis.
Panel A of Table 3 shows the influence of sibling gender on the indoctrination of brotherhood. The gender asymmetry of siblings’ gender on fraternity and parenting methods was not found. Explain that the sex of siblings has no effect on the child's fraternity.
Panel B indicates that the spillover effect between siblings seems to have led to the result of authoritative parents. Having brothers instead of sisters increases the daughter’s chance of receiving authoritarian education by 0.23 standard deviations (column (2)). Having a brother instead of a sister also increases the chance of a son receiving an authoritarian education by 0.29 standard deviations (column (4)). Spillover effects can be built on the basis of a specialized economy, allowing parents to develop a specific parenting method: Parents choose a parenting method based on the gender composition of the child, and treat all children in the same way. Since sons are usually more naughty than daughters, the more sons their parents have, the more likely they are to adopt authoritarian education.
4.3 Does filial piety work through altruism or guilt?
Does filial piety work through altruism or guilt? The empirical results on children’s education, health, and subjective well-being show that filial piety works through altruism rather than guilt. Analyzing the exact motivation behind preference instillation should be a direction worthy of further research.
The gender of siblings has little effect on children's education (Table 4) and health (Table A13), and child investment is used as a proxy variable for the theoretical construction.
The impact of gender on children's education and health is consistent with Hypothesis 3, which tends to be an altruistic indoctrination model rather than a guilt indoctrination model. The author's findings on educational results are in sharp contrast with previous studies on the gender composition of siblings. Except for the latest attempt (Chen et al., 2019) to use complex econometric techniques, all studies have failed to address the confusional changes in family size caused by the gender composition of existing children. Due to the endogenous sex composition of siblings, prejudice may arise.
The results of this article on education and health are consistent with the meaning of "bad child theorem" and "bad parent theorem". Becker et al. (2016) overturned the bad parent theorem: when children are altruistic to their parents, even selfish parents will make optimal investments in their children. The key difference between the bad child theorem and the bad parent theorem is not who is bad, but whether the operation transfer is transferred from parent to child, or from child to parent. The model in this paper shows that as long as the cost of instilling filial piety is small enough, parents always make the best investment in their children, regardless of the strictness of inheritance restrictions, so the gender of siblings has no effect on children's investment (Hypothesis 3).
4.4 Patriarchal society?
The author assumes that there is a difference in the income opportunities of children, and thus obtains the crowding-out effect of male brothers and sisters in instilling filial piety and support for their children, which is consistent with the empirical results of this article. What is worrying is that these empirical observations can be explained by social norms. For example, China as a patriarchal society can explain the views of this article. To solve this problem, the author established and tested two gender bias models based on preferences: (i) "pure" patriarchal preference; (ii) a model that prefers sons to support the elderly. The meanings of the two models are inconsistent with the empirical results of this article.
(I) "Pure" patriarchal
This shows that the parents themselves prefer their sons and obtain higher utility from the son's consumption. This model means: (a) Parents are more likely to instill filial piety in their daughters and seek support from their daughters; (b) If their children have brothers instead of sisters, parents are more likely or equally likely to instill filial piety in their children and to Children seek retirement. The empirical results of this article negate these two implications, and pure patriarchy is not the driving force behind the research results.
(Ii) A
patriarchal society that prefers to support the support of sons for the elderly may mean that when parents are old and have sons to support them, they will be respected by society. Although the predictions about old-age support and filial piety instillation are consistent with our findings, the predictions about the impact of children's gender on children's investment are inconsistent with our empirical results in education and health. Table 4 shows that sibling gender has basically no effect on children's education and health, which is inconsistent with the suggestion that male twins will increase investment in children.
4.5 Public support will weaken filial piety and reduce private support.
If filial piety is the rational choice of parents, then public support for the elderly will weaken the indoctrination of filial piety and exclude private support. In our theory, public support can be simulated. Either it is the exogenous growth of the parents’ income and the loss of the children’s income, or the government subsidizes the parents’ income from other sources of income. The theory predicts that public support will reduce the possibility of parents instilling filial piety in their children to obtain old-age care.
"Public support" is an indicator variable that measures whether at least one parent can receive a pension or pension allowance provided by the government. Approximately 52% of households in the data in this article received public support. The “reimbursement ratio” refers to the average reimbursement ratio of the parents’ medical expenses, and the average reimbursement ratio is about 64%. "Public support" squeezes out parents' support for their daughters in seeking old-age support and inculcates parents' expectations of filial piety. The results of the study also show that support from sons rather than daughters is equivalent to twice the effect of obtaining public support.
5 Conclusion
The author uses exclusively collected data on Chinese twins to study the formation of parents’ preference for their children’s care for the elderly. Consistent with the proposed theory, if the child has brothers instead of sisters, parents are less likely to seek support from the child or instill filial piety in the child, especially when the child is a daughter. The research results support the altruistic indoctrination model and provide empirical support for the "bad parent theorem" that filial piety induces parents to make optimal investments in their children.
While parents rationally inculcate their children's preferences for the elderly, the public pension security system is gradually improving to reduce the parents' motivation to instill filial piety in their children. In countries with a tradition of filial piety, public pension support tends to weaken the formation of filial piety, and will exclude private pension support in the long run.
One limitation of this study is that it only focuses on financial support and abstracts it from family support/aged care. If the son’s income is higher than that of the daughter, then the daughter should provide practical support at the expense of his own income, while the son maintains the labor supply and provides financial support to the parents. This gender division of siblings in providing elderly support/care may explain the daughter’s leading role in providing elderly care. Future research can focus on the substitution/complementarity between financial support and in-kind support, the division of labor between children in providing different types of support, and the substitutability of children's in-kind support for public support.
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