Motives for money-transfers within familiesthe role of transfers on education

Résumé

This work presents a theoretical framework to study if the motive for money-transfers within families is altruism or exchange. We propose models which explicitly incorporate transfers on education as an additional family transfer. Our models allows us to discriminate between the two possible motivations in any situation. We also derive some econometric specifications from our models and report empirical evidence on them using data from the PSID, considering separately inter-vivos transfers and bequests. In both cases, we find evidence against the altruism hypothesis, but not against the exchange hypothesis, and these conclusions could not be reached without taking into account transfers on education. Finally, we also test the econometric specifications by comparing the conditional distribution of monetary family transfers induced by our models and their actual conditional distribution, and the degree of similarity between them proves to be reasonably good.