This paper tests for the motives for private income transfers. We consider two motives: altruism and exchange. The question of private-transfer motives is important because such motivation can influence the effects of public income transfers on the distribution of income. Using a household...

Can Eastern European families most severely impoverished during the transition to capitalism rely on private family safety nets? This question is likely critical for the transition's success, but little is known about family networks in Eastern Europe. We analyze newly available Polish household...

This chapter uses data from the 1992/93 and 1997/98 Vietnam Living Standards Surveys (VLSS) to describe patterns of money transfers between households. Rapid economic growth during the 1990's did little to diminish the importance of private transfers in Vietnam. Private transfers are large and...

This paper uses the Viet Nam Living Standards Survey (VNLSS) to provide a snapshot of private transfer activity. We investigate private transfer patterns along a variety of dimensions, such as age, household resources, demographic make-up of the household and characteristics of the region of...

How can parents secure old-age support in the form of care, attention or financial transfers from their children? We explore the enforcement of implicit intergenerational agreements from a fresh angle by studying the possibility that the child's conduct is conditioned by the parents' example....

In recent years there has been rapidly growing interest in the implications of altruistic preferences for economic behavior. Undoubtedly most of this interest is fueled by altruism's often pivotal role in economic models and policy issues. Yet there is also an emerging consensus that empirical...

Recognizing that individualism, or weak family ties, may be favorable to economic development, we ask how family ties interact with climate to determine individual behavior and whether there is reason to believe that the strength of family ties evolves differently in different climates. For this...