Parents transfer a great deal to their adult children, yet we know little about the dynamic aspects of these transfers. Here I posit a dynamic altruistic model to explain parental giving. I then examine transfers over 17 years and find substantial changes in recipiency both across periods and among siblings, and a strong negative correlation between transfers and transitory income. I also find ...

An altruistic agent who may aid a person with a low income may cause that person to exert little effort to increase his income. Such behavior generates a Dilemma, in which welfare is lower than when no one is altruistic. We show how governmental transfers, which do not allow for reallocation from a person who saves much to one who saves little, reduces the effect, and can lead to an outcome whi...

We examine the social pension in South Africa, where large cash sums-about twice the median per capita income of African households-are paid to people qualified by age but irrespective of previous contributions. We present the history of the scheme and use a 1993 nationally representative survey to investigate the redistributive consequences of the transfers, documenting who receive the pension...

It has been shown that under perfect competition and constant returns-to-scale, a onesector real business cycle model may exhibit indeterminacy and sunspots when income tax rates are determined by a balanced-budget rule with a pre-set level of government expenditures. This paper shows that indeterminacy disappears if the government finances endogenous public spending and transfers with fixed in...

The world is rapidly converging towards lower fertility: in 2020, countries with a total fertility rate of less than 2.25 will encompass more three-quarters the population. This implies that determinants childbearing be increasingly similar high-income and middle-income regions world. In this article, I discuss economic demography relation to levels childbearing. How do different societies dist...

By supplementing income explicitly through payments or implicitly through taxes collected, income-based taxes and transfers make disposable income less variable. Because disposable income determines consumption, policies that smooth disposable income also create welfare improving consumption insurance. With data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics we find that annual consumption variation i...

BACKGROUND Illness-related costs for patients with tuberculosis (TB) ≥20% of pre-illness annual household income predict adverse treatment outcomes and have been termed "catastrophic." Social protection initiatives, including cash transfers, are endorsed to help prevent catastrophic costs. With this aim, cash transfers may either be provided to defray TB-related costs of households with a confi...

There are good theoretical reasons why transfers from parents are likely to be important around the time of the first home purchase. Transactions costs associated with trading houses make people with increasing income paths prefer to buy a house that is more expensive than what matches their current income. This together with a down-payment constraint make some first-time house owners borrow to...

Observational studies suggest that women’s income benefits children’s health and nutritional status, as well as education, more than men’s income, apparently because women are more likely to shift marginal resources to their children. These studies have influenced policies such as conditional cash transfers, which typically target women. However, previous studies have been unable to control for...