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？ 父母对子女的支持取决于父母是父亲还是母亲，还是子女是儿子还是女儿？ 尽管最近取得了进展，但大多数研究都是不分性别的。拟议的研究更加关注母亲、父亲、儿子和女儿因生物学考虑而产生的不同限制和利益。 它侧重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。它会如何影响供养子女的激励？亲子关系的不确定性是否会导致外祖母（她们与孙辈的生物学关系总是确定的）与父亲之间的转移行为差异？ 第二个主题是男性与女性后代的生殖和经济前景。一个营养充足的儿子原则上可以通过与几个配偶生孩子来“繁衍后代”。但女儿只能“去补充。“这些考虑是否会刺激有性别偏见的父母投资？虽然生物学视角在经济学中是新颖的，但其基本方法已经确立。拟议的项目将利用印度尼西亚家庭生活调查和四项美国家庭调查来调查：（1）在考虑到可观察到的代际转移决定因素的变化后，外祖父母与外祖父母的贡献有多大差异？(2)在祖父母养育中无法解释的母亲/父亲差异如何随着文化环境而变化，包括与父权不确定性相关的行为所涉及的习俗和传统？这些数据集中的每一个都包含与应用程序中处理的生物基础知识唯一相关的属性。

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.