Population Externalities and Optimal Social Policy

If fertility is not chosen in a socially optimal way, and if policies to directly target fertility are ineffective or politically infeasible, then public policies that affect fertility could have important welfare consequences through the fertility channel. We refer to these effects as population externalities, and in this paper we focus on one important variable that may have a causal impact on fertility: the education of potential parents. If increased education causes families to have fewer children, then a government would want to increase college tuition subsidies in the presence of environmental externalities such as climate change, to indirectly discourage families from having children who will generate future environmental costs. Alternatively, if fertility is inefficiently low, due to imperfect parental altruism for example, governments will want to lower tuition subsidies to encourage child-bearing. We present a simple model of the college enrollment decision and its fertility impacts, and show that such population externalities are quantitatively important: the optimal subsidy increases by about $5000 per year with climate change, and decreases by over $7000 per year with imperfect parental altruism. Our paper demonstrates how public economics can incorporate population externalities, and that such externalities can have significant impacts on optimal policy.

Beyond critical education for sustainable consumption

This paper empirically supports environmental courses and activities based upon ‘parental altruism’ as an effective environmental education in developing citizen’s pro-environmental values, attitudes, and behaviors. This is a case study of the Homemaker’s Union Consumer Cooperation (HUCC), a prominent environmental consumer non-profit organization in Taiwan with over 70000 members. Re-examining Paulo Freire’s critical dialogical pedagogy, this study uses Paul Stern’s three levels of value orientation to investigate changes of HUCC members’ consumption behaviors. The courses and activities with parental-care are efficiently received by members than those of critical knowledge with the environment in terms of developing pro-environmental behaviors. Parental altruism is the key in changing consumer’s environmental values. This finding contributes to rethinking the meaning of dialogue in environmental education.

The Elasticity of Intergenerational Substitution, Parental Altruism, and Fertility Choice

Dynastic models common in macroeconomics use a single parameter to control the willingness of individuals to substitute consumption both intertemporally, or across periods, and intergenerationally, or across parents and their children. This article defines the concept of elasticity of intergenerational substitution (EGS), and extends a standard dynastic model in order to disentangle the EGS from the EIS, or elasticity of intertemporal substitution. A calibrated version of the model lends strong support to the notion that the EGS is significantly larger than one. In contrast, estimates of the EIS suggests that it is at most one. What disciplines the identification is the need to match empirically plausible fertility rates for the U.S. We illustrate the potential role of the EGS in macroeconomics.

Time and Money: Social Security Benefits and Intergenerational Transfers

I examine the relationship between Social Security benefits, a major component of income in older age, and intergenerational transfers of financial help and caregiving. I find that the net pass-through rate of Social Security benefits from parents to children is about 15 percent, including only monetary inter vivos transfers. Parents with higher Social Security benefits provide more hours of help to children in the form of grandchild care, even though children significantly withdraw caregiving to parents along this dimension. Taken together, these results are consistent with parental altruism and have strong implications for the distributional consequences of Social Security reform.