Gender differentiation in intergenerational care-giving and migration choices

Abstract

We weave together care-giving, gender, and migration. We hypothesize that daughters who are mothers have a stronger incentive than sons who are fathers to demonstrate to their children the appropriate way of caring for one’s parents. The reason underlying this hypothesis is that women on average live longer than men, they tend to marry men who are older than they are and, thus, they are more likely than men to spend their last years without a spouse. Because it is more effective and less costly to care for parents if they live nearby, daughters with children do not move as far away from the parental home as sons with children or childless offspring. Data on the distance between the children’s location and the parents’ location extracted from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), in conjunction with data on selected demographic characteristics and institutional indicators taken from Eurostat, the OECD, and the World Bank, lend support to our hypothesis: compared to childless daughters, childless sons, and sons who are fathers, daughters who are mothers choose to live closer to their parents’ home.