Money and mental health: The impact of intergenerational transfers on elderly people in China
利用中国健康与养老追踪调查数据，研究发现成年子女的经济转移能显著减轻老年人的抑郁症状，且文化因素比收入因素更能解释这一效果。
Using three waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, this paper examines whether financial transfers from adult children to elderly parents affect the latter's mental health. Both OLS and instrumental variable (IV) estimates show that financial transfers significantly attenuate depressive symptoms of elderly individuals, with a much larger size of the IV estimates. We also examine the income and cultural channels through which intergenerational transfers work and further discuss the explanatory powers of these two channels through a decomposition analysis. The results suggest the cultural channel accounts for a larger proportion of the financial transfer effect. This means that the unique beneficial impact of intergenerational financial transfers on the mental health of older adults cannot be fully substituted in the foreseeable future.