Essays on the effects of upstream intergenerational support: from adult children to parents

This thesis presents three novel chapters that aim to provide causal evidence on the impact of intergenerational ties through care, education, and support from adult children on parental wellbeing and how work-related policies affect the provision of informal caregiving. The main innovations of the chapters address a common empirical challenge: drawing robust causal inferences by controlling for endogeneity concerns within observational data. Chapter Two examines the causal effect of flexible working arrangements in the workplace on parental informal care provision in the UK, using the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2010-2022) with both fixed effect and two-stage least squares estimation methods. The findings reveal a significant positive effect of flexible working arrangements on informal care provision. Access to such arrangements significantly increases the probability of children providing care to their parents. This effect varies according to the intensity of care provided and is heterogeneous according to family composition. Chapter Three investigates the causal impact of children's college attainment on parental mental health in the US, using the US Health and Retirement Study (1998-2018). Employing nonparametric partial identification analysis that relies on weak and credible assumptions to produce bounds on the population average treatment effect, the findings show a noteworthy positive causal effect of children’s college attainment on parental mental health status. The findings indicate that having a college graduate child improves parental mental health score, measured by the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale. Chapter Four examines the causal effect of receiving intergenerational support in the form of both financial and instrumental support from adult children on their parents’ wellbeing, measured by self-reported health and activities of daily living. Using the Indonesia Family Life Survey and instrumental variable strategy, the findings reveal a significant positive impact of receiving support on parental wellbeing. This effect is driven primarily by financial transfers. The effect varies by parents’ gender, age group, and region of residence. The mechanism analysis across the three chapters indicates that intergenerational support in its various forms and institutional and cultural settings is mostly mediated through time freedom and availability, financial relief through transfers and the exchange of knowledge-based and emotional support.