Ageing and Demographic Transition in China
Paper Session
Friday, Jan. 5, 2024 12:30 PM - 2:15 PM (CST)
- Chair: Suqin Ge, Virginia Tech
Deciphering the Upward Spillover Effect of Children’s Education on Parental Cognitive Aging: Evidence from the Compulsory Schooling Law in China
Abstract
Cognitive functioning is critical to our life, health and well-being. It has proved challenging to promote cognitive health among older adults to slow down their aging process. This paper provides novel evidence on the spillover effect of increasing children’s education on parents’ cognitive aging and investigates changes in family caring arrangements that may explain the effect. Using multiple waves of China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study to model trajectories of cognitive aging, and exploring temporal and geographic variations in the compulsory schooling law enforcement, we show that increases in children’s education impose larger effect on reducing level of cognitive deficit among older parents than smoothing their trajectories of cognitive decline. The effect is also larger on crystal intelligence than on fluid intelligence. While both more educated and less educated children benefit parental cognitive health, they demonstrate some within-family coordination. Specifically, more educated children tend to offer older parents more resource-related support, including financial transfer, household appliances and equipment, while less educated children often engage in more time-related support, such as living relatively close to parents, providing informal care and decision-making support, not leaving grandchild care burden to parents. These findings offer insights into leveraging the intergenerational spillover effect of educational policy to delay cognitive aging and related diseases.Demographic Transition, Industrial Policies and Chinese Economic Growth
Abstract
We build a unified framework to quantitatively examine the demographic transition and industrial policies in contributing to China’s economic growth between 1976 and 2015. We find that the demographic transition and industrial policy changes by themselves account for a large fraction of the rise in household and corporate savings relative to total output and the rise in the country’s per capita output growth. Importantly, their interactions also lead to a sizable fraction of the increases in savings since the late 1980s and reduce growth after 2010. A novel and important factor that drives these dynamics is endogenous human capital accumulation, which depresses household savings between 1985 and 2010 but leads to substantial gains in per capita output growth after 2005.Housing Privatization as Intergenerational Redistribution
Abstract
This paper develops a quantitative general equilibrium model to argue that housing privatization in China serves as intergenerational transfer from the young generation to the old generations, who are poor in income when the reform in housing market starts. The model mimics two major housing market reforms implemented in 1994 and 1998, respectively. We calibrate the model to examine the welfare implications of the two reforms. A rising housing price associated with housing privatization not only affects welfare of different cohorts through intergenerational transfer, but impacts welfare across income groups within cohorts.Discussant(s)
Xi Chen
,
Yale University
Suqin Ge
,
Virginia Tech
Kaiji Chen
,
Emory University
Fang Yang
,
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
JEL Classifications
- J1 - Demographic Economics