Family Structure and Transfer Measures in the Health and Retirement Study: Background and Overview

This paper describes the rationale for and the measures of family structure and inter-vivos giving in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Of particular interest to the HRS is the extent to which transfers affect the labor supply of donors, especially women. Because all children and parents are individually profiled, HRS data can be used to examine the joint allocation of space, time, and money among competing kin. Data on siblings of respondents with living parents provide further opportunities to consider how adult children distribute the burden of parent care among themselves. Using the baseline HRS, we describe the quality of data on kin attributes and the correlations among family structures, transfers, and work.