Intergenerational transfers, insurance, and the transmission of inequality

父母经济富裕的孩子往往经济上也很成功，他们的收入、教育水平和财富水平都相对较高。据估计，英国经济地位的代际关联性是发达国家中最强的。按照国际标准，这些差距不仅很大，而且近几十年来也在扩大。鉴于机会均等是一个共同的政策目标，由父母背景决定的经济结果差异迫切需要关注。解决这种差异需要了解它们是如何产生的，以及哪些政策可以产生影响。目的和目标我们提出了一项雄心勃勃的研究计划，将进一步了解父母将其经济地位传递给子女的机制，以及这一过程如何受到各种政府政策的影响。我们的目标是通过使用新的方法，利用大型相关的行政数据集，并建立经济决策的尖端模型，在现有文献的基础上取得一些进展。我们的第一批研究将提供父母住房财富增加对子女结果影响的第一个因果估计。对于年轻的购房者来说，父母的帮助变得越来越重要。我们将利用英国关于亲子关系的最新数据和一种新的实证方法，量化财富冲击从父母到孩子的传导。这将有助于我们了解近几十年来英国房价上涨对年轻一代财富和住房拥有率不平等的影响。我们的第二股研究将利用新获得的转移数据，以及代际转移和购房的新模型，来评估父母在购房方面的经济援助和鼓励拥有住房的政策对不平等的影响。我们的第三股研究考虑了活体间从父母到他们成年子女的转移，以及这种转移在确保子女免受不利冲击方面可能发挥的作用。了解父母何时以及为什么向子女进行这种转移的原因，是设计转移征税和提供社会保险的重要考虑因素。我们将使用无与伦比的跨代关联管理数据来源，涵盖活人之间的转移，以探索父母如何应对失业和他们的孩子经历的其他冲击。在第四也是最后一条研究中，我们将使用父母在孩子身上投入时间和金钱的模型，来估计不同转移之间的重要互动，以及父母在不同投资之间选择的方式。这将使我们能够明确区分不同因素(父母时间投资、教育投资和现金转移)在塑造孩子结果方面的贡献。然后，我们可以模拟父母和儿童对政策改革的反应，例如接受高等教育机会的变化，以确定它们对儿童投资的影响，并最终确定不平等的代际传递。这项研究将为政策制定者、研究人员以及那些对财产和遗产税、储蓄和住房政策、教育政策和社会流动性感兴趣的私营和第三部门的人提供一些相关的见解。我们将通过产生一系列的输出来最大化潜在的利益，包括将提交给顶级经济期刊的一系列学术文章，以及将我们的关键发现传达给非学术受众的非技术性摘要。

ContextChildren of economically successful parents tend to be economically successful themselves, having relatively high levels of income, education and wealth. By some estimates, the intergenerational association of economic status in the UK is the strongest in the developed world. These gaps are not only large by international standards, but have also grown in recent decades. Given that equality of opportunity is a common policy goal, disparities in economic outcomes determined by parental background are in urgent need of attention. Tackling such disparities requires an understanding of how they arise and which policies can have an impact.Aims and objectivesWe propose an ambitious programme of research that will further our understanding of the mechanisms whereby parents transmit their economic status to their children, and how this process is influenced by various government policies. We aim to make several advances over the existing literature by employing novel methods, exploiting large linked administrative datasets, and building cutting-edge models of economic decisions.Our first strand of research will provide the first causal estimates of the impact of increases in parents' housing wealth on child outcomes. Parental assistance has become increasingly important for young home-buyers. We will exploit newly-available data on parent-child links in the UK, and a novel empirical approach, to quantify the transmission of wealth shocks from parents to children. This will help us to understand the impact of the increases in UK house prices in recent decades on inequalities in wealth and homeownership amongst younger generations. Our second strand of research will draw on newly available transfer data, and a novel model of intergenerational transfers and home purchases, to estimate the impact of both parental financial assistance in home purchasing and policies to encourage home ownership on inequality.Our third strand of research considers inter-vivos transfers from parents to their adult children and role such transfers might play in insuring children against adverse shocks. Understanding the reasons when and why parents make such transfers to their children is an important consideration for the design of the taxation of transfers and provision of social insurance. We will use an unrivalled source of intergenerationally-linked administrative data covering inter-vivos transfers to explore how parents respond to unemployment and other shocks that their children experience.In the fourth and final strand of research, we will use a model of parental investments of time and money in their children to estimate important interactions between different transfers and the ways in which parents choose between different investments. This will allow us to explicitly separate the contribution of different factors (parental time investments, educational investments, and cash-transfers) in shaping child outcomes. We can then simulate the responses of parents and children to policy reforms, such as changes in access to higher education, to determine their effect on investments in children and, ultimately, the intergenerational transmission of inequality. Applications and benefitsThis research will yield a number of insights relevant to policy-makers, researchers and those in the private and third sector interested in property and inheritance taxation, saving and housing policy, education policy, and social mobility. We will maximise potential benefits by producing a range of outputs including a series of academic articles that will be submitted to top economic journals and non-technical summaries that communicate our key findings to non-academic audiences.