The grant produced a paper entitled "An Investigation of the Effect of Informal Insurance on Household Retirement Saving" which has been submitted to the Southern Economic Journal.
It has been suggested that family members can establish informal insurance arrangements that serve to provide retirement income in the same manner as social insurance. The researchers investigate whether another potential explanation for the inadequate saving of many U.S. households is the presence of informal insurance, in the form of potential inter vivos transfers to retired family members. The authors use data from Wave I of the Health and Retirement Study to test the hypothesis that potential transfers from children crowd out retirement saving. They find no evidence that parents with larger families adjust retirement wealth levels downward. They find some evidence to suggest that parents' retirement portfolio composition is affected by family size.
