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Reciprocity in the Formation of Intergenerational Coresidence

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Abstract

Children play a key role in supporting elderly parents, and the literature has consistently found reciprocity whereby parents compensate their children for providing care and attention. To understand how the mode of compensation is related to the characteristics of parents and children, we studied the determinants of transitions to parent–child coresidence in Japan. The results conformed to the hypothesis that the mode of reciprocity depends on the costs and benefits of coresidence for each family member. Parental assets and care needs were associated with coresidence. Additionally, transitions to coresidence with married parents were characterized by young, unmarried children and the presence of parental housing assets, whereas transitions to coresidence with widowed mothers were characterized by mothers’ non-housing assets.

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Notes

  1. The literature has also noted that social norms and traditions might play a role in providing incentives for children to look after their parents (Takagi et al. 2007; Wakabayashi and Horioka 2009; Wolff 2001).

  2. Approximately 18 and 14 % were cared for primarily by a coresident child and a coresident child’s spouse, respectively, whereas 25 % were cared for primarily by a coresident spouse.

  3. We do not argue that intergenerational coresidence and aged care are equivalent. Aged care takes a variety of forms, including formal care, community care, and distant informal care. Neither do we advocate maintaining or promoting informal care by coresident children.

  4. For details of the NUJLSOA, see http://www.usc.edu/dept/gero/CBPH/nujlsoa/.

  5. The coresidence rate in Japan is also declining in the longer term. In 1986, among households with at least one elderly individual, 31 % consisted of only one elderly individual or an elderly couple. This number steadily increased to 52 % in 2007 (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2008).

  6. Hence, people who died before the second interview were not included in our analysis. This exclusion is a potential source of selection bias, particularly given that Table 2 shows slightly higher mortality for those who lived with children compared to those who lived without children. However, this difference was small and unlikely to significantly affect our main conclusions.

  7. This figure may be biased if the re-contact rate was significantly lower for those who moved. However, even using our most conservative estimates, the vast majority of parents (75–80 %) who started coresidence did not move and accommodated children.

  8. Physical activities used to construct the index included (1) walking 200 or 300 m; (2) climbing 10 stairs without resting; (3) standing for 2 h; (4) continuing to sit for 2 h; (5) squatting and kneeling; (6) raising hands above head; (7) extending arms out in front; (8) grasping with fingers or using fingers easily; and (9) lifting a heavy load of 10 kg. ADL included (1) taking a bath/shower; (2) dressing; (3) eating; (4) standing up from a bed or chair and sitting down; (5) walking around the house; (6) going outside; and (7) going to the bathroom.

  9. Because this land area information was available for Wave 2 and after, the land area for the Wave 1 sample was obtained from Wave 2. This approach required us to drop elderly parents who moved between Waves 1 and 2. The land price was constructed from a government source as an average land price of residential properties sampled in each municipal area (Public notice of land prices, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism). Assuming that the land price constituted approximately three-quarters of house wealth (Ando et al. 1986), the total house wealth was computed as house wealth = land area × unit land price/0.75. When a parent lived in an owned house with a land-lease right, one-third of the land price was used as the house wealth.

  10. The use of random and fixed effects models is the standard approach to overcome this bias. This approach, however, is not feasible in our framework because it requires the removal of a large number of observations that appear only once.

  11. We wrote our own likelihood function in STATA. The code is available upon request.

  12. Rented properties did not include assisted-living facilities because individuals living in these facilities were not included in our sample.

  13. Another explanation for the low propensity of coresidence of those who lived in rented properties is attrition bias because these parents were more likely to move when they started coresidence with children. Because the re-contact rate was lower for those who moved, the new coresidence by these parents was underrepresented. Our investigation of the relationship between rental property status, mobility, and the re-contact rate found that this attrition bias was highly likely to exist, but the size of bias appeared much smaller than the size necessary to fully explain the estimated coefficient even if we used the most conservative estimates. We found no indication of such bias for AssetOther.

  14. In this study, we did not attempt to interpret the coefficients of the two wave dummies. On the one hand, they may reflect changes in the composition of the population due to attrition. On the other hand, the time trend may be influenced by the introduction of the public Long-Term Care Insurance (LTCI) in 2000. Nevertheless, Tamiya et al. (2011) found that the introduction of LTCI had a limited effect on reducing family informal care.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (Project Number DP110100773) and from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR). We also thank the Nihon University Center for Information Networking for the use of the Nihon University Japanese Longitudinal Study of Aging data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Economics Discipline Group, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2007, Australia

    Meliyanni Johar & Shiko Maruyama

  2. School of Economics, Nagoya University, Furocho, Chikusa, Nagoya, 464-8601, Japan

    Sayaka Nakamura

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  1. Meliyanni Johar
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Correspondence to Sayaka Nakamura.

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Johar, M., Maruyama, S. & Nakamura, S. Reciprocity in the Formation of Intergenerational Coresidence. J Fam Econ Iss 36, 192–209 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-013-9387-7

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