Can Policy Change Culture? Government Pension Plans and Traditional Kinship Practices
- (pp. 1880-1917)
(Complimentary)
Abstract
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.Citation
Bau, Natalie. 2021. "Can Policy Change Culture? Government Pension Plans and Traditional Kinship Practices." American Economic Review, 111 (6): 1880-1917. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20190098Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- G51 Household Finance: Household Saving, Borrowing, Debt, and Wealth
- I20 Education and Research Institutions: General
- J15 Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination
- J16 Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
- J32 Nonwage Labor Costs and Benefits; Retirement Plans; Private Pensions
- Z13 Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification