Do parents in developing countries benefit from their children’s education at old age?

This project investigates whether adult children's educational attainment improves the health of their elderly parents and determines the transfer of monetary and in-kind support to parents using two waves of the Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS). Specifically, we propose to study: (1) Whether adult children's education causes better health outcomes of their elderly parents and whether these effects vary by child-specific characteristics (e.g., sex, birth order, relationship to parents-biological, adopted, step child) and/or for mothers and fathers; (2) Whether children's education determines provision of in-kind and monetary support to aging parents and whether this provision varies by child-specific characteristics and for mothers and fathers; and (3) The feasibility of estimating similar models with other developing country datasets for preparation of an R01 application to the National Institute of Aging (NIA) to permit comparisons across different country contexts. To account for unobserved family characteristics and endogeneity of children's education, we use both fixed-effect (FE) and instrumental variable (IV) approaches.