Living conditions of children and parental well-being
Subtitle: evidence from German data on life satisfaction
By: by Johannes Schwarze.
Series: Discussion paper ;; no. 1200; Discussion paper (Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit : Online) ;; no. 1200
Publisher: IZA
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Bonn, Germany
Language: eng
Format: Electronic resource
Subjects: Children -- Germany; Quality of life -- Germany; Parent and child -- Germany
Description: "The question that this paper addresses is whether or not parents are altruistic towards their children. A new approach will be introduced, where the life satisfaction data of parents will be regressed onto the living conditions of their children who now live independently. After controlling for unobserved household characteristics, no positive effect of children's actual household income on parents' satisfaction can be found. However, children's health and education have a positive impact on parental well-being. Both can be interpreted as an approximation of children's lifetime incomes. We also regress parental life satisfaction on the predicted life satisfaction of their children. A significant positive effect can be found, which can be interpreted as weak evidence for parental altruism. The paper uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP)"--Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit web site.
Notes: Also available in print.
Includes bibliographical references.
Title from PDF file as viewed on 5/9/2005.
System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.