Can Policy Change Culture? Government Pension Plans and Traditional Kinship Practices

By N. Bau. The American Economic Review, 2021

116 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Policies may change the incentives that allow cultural practices to persist. To test this, I study matrilocality and patrilocality, kinship traditions that determine daughters’ and sons’ post-marriage residences, and thus, which gender lives with and supports parents in their old age. Two separate policy experiments in Ghana and Indonesia show that pension policies reduce the practice of these traditions. I also show that these traditions incentivize parents to invest in the education of children who traditionally coreside with them. Consequently, when pension plans change cultural practices, they also reduce educational investment. This finding further demonstrates that policy can change culture. (JEL G51, I20, J15, J16, J32, Z13)

Subfields: Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a87527631eac944e880c3571fb7d8b0a50514cb4

Citations in the corpus

• Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Intergenerational Investment* (2018, unknown): “Section 4 measures the effects of negotiation 3Examples of papers focusing on intergenerational intra-household bargaining include Bergman (2015); Jensen and Miller (2017); Ashraf, Bau, Nunn and Voena (forthcoming); and Bau (2019).”