Mom and Dad we're broke, can you help? A comparative study of financial transfers within families before and after the Great Recession

Abstract

This paper examines financial transfers within families before and after the great recession. Transfers within families have historically been an important source of wealth accumulation for younger generations, but what happens to these transfers when incomes and wealth are distorted by a recession? We document patterns of financial transfers within families in the U.S. and Germany before and after the Great Recession. This paper uses data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Critical components of the analysis include the estimation of a difference-and-differents model to compare transfer behavior over time, and multiple triple-difference-and-difference models to further study how transfer behavior differs for different population groups. Key limitations are related to available data. The SHARE data used does not contain information for year 2007, which thus had to be excluded from the analysis. In addition, harmonizing the both datasets might introduce some potential of errors.