The Patterns of Parental Intervivos Transfers to Adult Children

Parental intervivos transfers to adult children occur in families across the income distribution.
This paper documents and analyzes novel patterns of parental intervivos transfers that are
informative to dynamic models of transfers. We use longitudinal data on parental transfers from
the 1996-2014 Health and Retirement Study to characterize the age proÖle of transfers, including
the probability and the transfer amount (unconditional and conditional). We then follow the
1967-71 cohort to describe the frequency of transfers, the distribution of years between transfers,
and the total transfers received during di§erent age brackets. Last, we use a dynamic model of
parental altruism to analyze the mechanisms generating the distinct transfer types observed in
the data. We Önd that in addition to the cross-sectional patterns documented in the literature,
parental altruism is essential to explain the novel dynamic facts on intervivos transfers from
longitudinal data.