As part of the Brown Bag Lunch series, the International Economics Department at the Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to a public talk given by Rong Dai, PhD student in Development Economics.

Rong Dai will present her research work entitled In Exchange for Nothing: Marriage Payments and Old-Age Support in China.

Abstract: Marriage payments in China can be seven times as large as annual household income, and parental contribution to children's marriage payments is considered a significant non-human capital investment in children, which may serve as a means to assure the old-age support from children. In this paper, I study how the provision of marriage payments to children affects inter-generational transfers in the later period. Using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), I first analyze the provision of marriage payments in the context of intra-household allocation. Increasing maternal resources make children, especially daughters, more likely to receive marriage payments from parents, which is a compensation for daughters' low human capital; whereas the change in paternal resources does not matter for the likelihood of offering marriage payments. Compared to their non-recipient siblings, children who used to receive marriage payments do not provide parents with more financial support, which is a strong rejection of the exchange motive for offering marriage payments to children. However, parents do benefit from human capital investment in their children, implying that to receive old-age support from children, parents should invest human capital in children in their early years instead of non-human capital in their adulthood.