Abstract: Do parents forge children’s preference for old-age support? Becker (1993) conjectures that the inculcation of filial piety increases parents’ investment in children’s human capital. We provide the first empirical evidence on parents’ instilling of filial piety in children, by combining the natural experiment of twins with China’s One-Child Policy to obtain exogenous variations in children’s gender composition. Among the different models of filial-piety inculcation, our empirical results favour a Beckerian model of altruism inculcation in which parents solicit support from the child with a higher earnings endowment.

Keywords: preference inculcation; filial piety; children’s gender composition

本文于2020年2月在线发表于Economic Journal，郭汝飞为本文第一作者。Economic Journal于1891年创刊，是英国皇家经济学会主办的经济学综合类期刊，是太阳官网英文A类奖励期刊。

链接：https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueaa027