Data and Code for: Can Policy Change Culture? Government Pension Plans and Traditional Kinship Practices

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Natalie Bau, UCLA

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
Replication			02/22/2021 06:05:PM

Project Citation:

Bau, Natalie. Data and Code for: Can Policy Change Culture? Government Pension Plans and Traditional Kinship Practices. Nashville, TN: American Economic Association [publisher], 2021. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2021-05-24. https://doi.org/10.3886/E130544V1

Project Description

Summary:

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 co-reside with them. Consequently, when pension plans change cultural practices, they also reduce educational investment. This finding further demonstrates that policy can change culture.

Keywords: cultural transmission, cultural change, kinship traditions, intergenerational transfers.

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: public survey data; census data; ipums; ifls

JEL Classification:
      H52 National Government Expenditures and Education
      I00 Health, Education, and Welfare: General
      J14 Economics of the Elderly; Economics of the Handicapped; Non-labor Market Discrimination
      O12 Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development

Geographic Coverage: Indonesia, Ghana

Time Period(s): 1/1/1971 – 12/31/2010

Collection Date(s): 1971 – 2010

Universe: Census data constitute random samples of all individuals in Indonesia and Ghana in the census years.

Data Type(s): census/enumeration data; geographic information system (GIS) data; survey data

Methodology

Data Source: Indonesia Family Life Survey
Statistics Indonesia: 1971 census, 1980 census, 1990 census, 1995 intercensus, 2010 census
Ghana Statistical Services: 2000 census
IPUMS (Minnesota Population Center)
Ethnographic Atlas
Perusahan Umum Asuransi Sosial Tenaga Kerja (1985)

Unit(s) of Observation: ethnic groups, districts, individuals

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Published Versions

V1 [2021-05-24]

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