# INTERGENERATIONAL FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE IN FAMILIES

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA · 1993 · $180,490

## Abstract

The principal objective of the project is to assess how changes in the life
course of both parents and children influence the incidence, direction and
magnitudes of financial assistance from parents to their adult children,
and the siblings of these children, and from adult children to their
parents.  Data from all five cohorts of the National Longitudinal Surveys
of Labor Market Experience--the Young and Mature Men and Women and the
Youth cohorts--will be combined and linked to form pairs of siblings and/or
parent/child matches stratified by sex and race.  Longitudinal information
on these matched pairs will be used to obtain estimates, by race and sex,
of the importance of intergenerational financial transfers (i) relative to
the incomes of both recipients and of donors and (ii) relative to the
amount of public assistance income, by program type, received over a
substantial fraction of the joint life cycles of parents and their adult
children (up to 17 years).  Estimates will also be obtained of (a) how
changes in family structure (fertility, divorce, death), in wage rates, in
unemployment spells, in the incidence of illness and other life-cycle
events in both the "child" and "parental" generations jointly influence the
flows of finance assistance between them and (b) the effects of public
transfer income on intergenerational family transfers.  The analyses will
employ estimation procedures and specifications that allow for the
existence of time persistent unobservables correlated across generations,
for endogenous labor supply and savings behavior and for strategic
behavior.  Behavioral models of intergenerational transfers incorporating
uncertainty and dynamic behavior will be developed and estimated with the
objective of achieving a better understanding of the motivations for
intergenerational transfers and for evaluating the robustness of prior
findings on exchange versus altruistic motives to the introduction of more
realistic assumptions about the heterogeneity of populations and life cycle
behavior.  The merged panels of cohort data will thus be used to ascertain
how the consequences of differing but contemporaneous life-cycle events
experienced by parents and their adult children are shared between and
across generations and how public programs affect these intergenerational
financial link-ages.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 2199837
- **Project number:** 5R01HD026089-04
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
- **SAM.gov UEI:** GM1XX56LEP58
- **Principal Investigator:** MARK R ROSENZWEIG
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 1993
- **Award amount:** $180,490
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 1989-12-01 → 1994-11-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/2199837

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 2199837, INTERGENERATIONAL FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE IN FAMILIES (5R01HD026089-04). Retrieved via MORVS 2026-10-25 from https://api.morvs.ai/grant/nih/2199837. Licensed CC0.

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