‘More Children, More Happiness?’: New Evidence from Elderly Parents in China

Arbeitspapier

In this paper, we test the conventional wisdom in developing countries of ‘more children, more happiness’ by exploiting the cohort and provincial variations of elderly parents exposed to the one-child policy in China. Using nationally representative survey data from the 2015 China Health and Retirement Longitude Survey, the results from both the ordinary least square and two-stage least square methods find that more children can enhance elderly parents’ subjective well-being (SWB) measured with either life satisfaction or depression mood. The effect is channelled by raising their satisfaction with children and receiving in-kind transfers from children. The heterogeneity analysis also shows that the effect of children on parents’ life satisfaction is heterogenous to sex composition, first-birth gender, and parents' age. Our study provides new causal evidence of the impact of fertility on elderly parents’ SWB from a developing economy.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: GLO Discussion Paper ; No. 366

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth ; Economics of the Elderly; Economics of the Handicapped; Non-labor Market Discrimination ; Health: Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health ; General Welfare; Well-Being
• Subject: children ; happiness ; life satisfaction ; elderly parents ; depression ; China

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Gao, Yanyan ; Qu, Zhaopeng
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Global Labor Organization (GLO)
• (where): Essen
• (when): 2019

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/200243
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET