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IZA
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Living Conditions of Children and Parental Well-Being – Evidence from German Data on Life Satisfaction
by
Johannes Schwarze
(July 2004)
Abstract:
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).
Text: See Discussion Paper No. 1200
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