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The living arrangements of elderly widows, their children, and their children's spouses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2019

Carlos Bethencourt
Carlos Bethencourt*
Affiliation:
Universidad de La Laguna, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: cbethenc@ull.es
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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the role that the marital status of children has in shaping the living arrangements of their widowed mothers and themselves and to explain the increase in the proportion of elderly widows living alone, which grew by 23.2% in the USA between 1970 and 1990. We propose a model where living arrangements are determined as the outcome of a game between the mother and her child, and where the fundamentals of the model depend on children's marital status. We estimate the model using 1970 data. We calculate the accuracy of the estimation and we obtain an excellent fit. Using the same measure of accuracy, the estimated model predicts that changes in the incomes of both the widow and her offspring and changes in the children's marital status generate more than the 83% of the increase in the number of widows living alone.

Keywords

Intergenerational household formationliving arrangementsmarital status

JEL classification

D13: Household Production and Intrahousehold Allocation C80: General E60: General
Type
Research Papers
Information
Journal of Demographic Economics , Volume 85 , Issue 2 , June 2019 , pp. 95 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © Université catholique de Louvain 2019 

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Footnotes

Current version October 2018.

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