The old folks at home: parental state pension eligibility and adult children’s well-being

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

August 3, 2026

Summary:

We here use UK panel data and establish the causal effect of parental State Pension eligibility on their adult children’s well-being in a Regression Discontinuity Design analysis. The life and income satisfaction of adult children whose mothers become eligible for the State Pension both rise by 0.06 standard deviations in the short run. These impacts are stronger for adult children with lower incomes, who have young children of their own, and who live close to their parents. These findings are consistent with the key role of intergenerational time transfers from older eligible mothers in enhancing their adult children’s well-being.

Published in

Review of Economics of the Household

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-026-09870-0

ISSN

15695239

Subjects

Notes

Online Early

Copyright © 2026, The Author(s)

Open Access

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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