Biological Basics and Intergenerational Transfers

描述(由申请人提供)：性别和生殖生物学的考虑如何影响代际转移行为？父母对孩子的赡养取决于父母是父亲还是母亲，或者孩子是儿子还是女儿？尽管最近取得了进展，但大多数研究都是性别盲目的。拟议的研究更多地关注母亲、父亲、儿子和女儿因生物学考虑而产生的独特制约和利益。它聚焦于生殖生物学中的两个突出主题：第一个是亲子关系的不确定性。这可能会对养育子女的动机产生怎样的影响？例如，亲子关系的不确定性是否会导致外祖母(她们与孙子的血缘关系总是确定的)与父亲之间的转移行为存在差异？第二个主题是男性与女性后代的生殖和经济前景。一个衣食住行的儿子原则上可以通过与几个配偶生孩子来“前进和繁衍”。但女儿只能“上前加法”。这些考虑是否会刺激带有性别偏见的父母投资？虽然生物学视角在经济学中是新奇的，但基本的方法已经很好地确立了。这个拟议的项目将使用印度尼西亚家庭生活调查(IFLS)和四项美国家庭调查来调查：(1)在考虑了代际转移的可观察决定因素的差异后，祖父母和母亲的贡献差异还有多少？(2)祖父母养育子女的原因不明的差异如何随着文化环境的变化而变化，包括与担心父子关系不确定的行为有关的做法和传统？这些数据集中的每一个都包含与本申请中涉及的生物基础唯一相关的属性。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): How do considerations of gender and reproductive biology figure into intergenerational transfer behavior? Does a parent's support for a child depend upon whether the parent is a father or mother, or whether the child is a son or daughter? Despite recent progress, the majority of studies are gender-blind. The proposed research gives more attention to the distinct constraints and interests of mothers, fathers, sons and daughters that emanate from biological considerations. It focuses on two prominent themes in reproductive biology: The first is paternity uncertainty. How might it affect incentives to provide for children? Might paternity uncertainty generate differences in the transfer behavior between, say, maternal grandmothers (whose biological relationship to grandchildren is always certain) versus paternal ones? The second theme is reproductive and economic prospects of male versus female offspring. A well provisioned son can in principle "go forth and multiply" by having children with several mates. But a daughter can only "go forth and add." Might these considerations spur sex-biased parental investments? Though a biological perspective is novel within economics, the underlying methods are well established. The proposed project will use the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) and four U.S. household surveys to investigate: (1) How much of the difference in contributions of maternal versus paternal grandparents remains after accounting for variation in observable determinants of intergenerational transfers? (2) How does the unexplained maternal/paternal differential in grandparenting vary with cultural milieu, including practices and traditions that have been implicated in behavior connected with concerns about paternity uncertainty? Each of these data sets contains attributes uniquely pertinent to biological basics addressed in the application.