Analyzing motives for money-transfers within families:the role of transfers for education

摘要

We present a theoretical framework to examine whether altruism or exchange is the motive for money-transfers within families. In our theoretical mod-els, transfers for education are incorporated as an additional family transfer that is determined before money-transfers are decided. These models lead to testable impli-cations about the relationship between transfers for education and money-transfers. Various econometric models are derived and estimated with PSID data on inter-vi-vos transfers and bequests. The empirical evidence is compatible with both altruism or exchange, but provides information about how these motivations work. The com-parison between the empirical distribution of money-transfers and the distributions induced by our econometric models shows that these models are suitable.