Professor Hidehiko Ichimura of the University of Tokyo will share recent results from his research on the health of older adults and the retirement process in Japan. His research draws upon a unique data source, the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement (JSTAR). This rich dataset provides information on how middle-aged and elderly Japanese live in terms of economic, social, and health outcomes, and how these interact with their family status. The JSTAR project aims to provide longitudinal data enabling detailed policy-relevant comparisons to other industrialized countries (e.g. the Survey on Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe, the US Health and Retirement Study, the English Longitudinal Study on Aging, and similar surveys now launched in Korea, China, and India).

Professor Ichimura received his BA in economics from Osaka University in 1981 and his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1988. He has taught at the University of Minnesota, the University of Pittsburgh, and University College London. He is now Professor in the Graduate School of Public Policy and Graduate School of Economics at the University of Tokyo. 

China and some other Asian countries have experienced a large surplus of men of marriageable age. The existing literature studies the impact of sex imbalance using aggregate sex ratios, such as at the county, city, or province level. However, these studies may miss important impacts on health and behavior because the relevance of surplus sons to family decisions mainly stems from pressure conveyed through social interactions with the local reference group.

This paper draws from unique social network data, collected from households' long-term spontaneous gift exchange records (li dan), combined with household panel data from 18 Chinese villages to explore the prevalence of men's localized pressure to get married. The surveyed villages are home to Chinese ethnic minorities, which largely circumvents endogenous fertility decisions on the first-born child due to the implementation of One Child Policy and its associated relaxations afterwards. To identify the effect of pressure to find wives for their sons on parental risky behavior, we focus on comparing families with a first-born boy versus a first-born girl and distinguish the network spillover effect from the direct effect.

The spatial econometric decompositions suggest that the pressure mainly originates from a few friends with unmarried sons and unbalanced sex ratios in the friendship networks, though own village sex ratio and having an unmarried son also affects parental risk-taking behavior. The results are consistent across specifications allowing for long-run and short-run effects. We also find similar patterns for parental working hours, their likelihood to engage in entrepreneurial activities and decision to migrate. In contrast, parents with a daughter do not demonstrate this pattern. Since the sex ratio imbalance in China will probably worsen in the next decade, disentangling the real sources of marriage market pressure may help design policies to improve parental well-being.

Dr. Xi Chen's main research interests involve health economics and development economics in the developing contexts. He recently completed his PhD in applied economics at Cornell. His research seeks to better understand how social interactions affect health behavior and outcomes, how socioeconomic status drives social competition. Most of his current work draws on primary data from China and secondary data from India and Indonesia.

Why are transfers from younger to older generations generous in some societies and not in others? For example, people in northeast Japan tend to provide better nursing care to their aged parents and invest more in their children's education than those in the southwest. Communities in the northeast tend to be small and isolated compared to those in the southwest. This paper argues that differences in intergenerational dependence are due to demographic variation in community networks. This analysis of sustainability of intergenerational transfers posits a game theoretical model of overlapping generations in which breadwinners make transfers to their parents and children. A novel feature of the model is that there is a local community that may supply information about its members' past behaviors. I demonstrate that an efficient level of intergenerational transfers can be sustained if neighbors "gossip" about each other. As an implication, my theory suggests that individuals in a close-knit community prefer lower levels of social protection. Empirical results from Japan support this argument: Individuals who interact with their neighbors tend to provide better nursing care to their aged parents, spend more on their children’s education, and demand less from the government than those who do not interact with their neighbors.      

Population aging in Asian societies is accompanied by changes in intergenerational living arrangements, which can have substantial health and economic implications for the elderly parents and their adult children. Dr. Young Kyung Do will present some of his recent works related to elderly living arrangements in South Korea. These works include the effect of coresidence with an adult child on depressive symptoms among older widowed women; the relationship between adult children's coresidence with parents and their labor force participation; and interrelations between expectations about bequests and informal care with special emphasis on the role of intergenerational coresidence. In these studies, Dr. Do attempted to account for a common methodological issue: living arrangements are not always randomly assigned but may be jointly decided with the outcome of interest taken into account by either the elderly parents or their adult children. While this seminar will focus on the South Korean context, the significance and implications apply to many other Asian societies undergoing population aging and marked transitions in elderly living arrangements.

Dr. Young Kyung Do is an assistant professor at the Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School (Duke-NUS), Program in Health Services and Systems Research. His research interests include the economic and health system impact of population aging and noncommunicable disease; interactions between self-care, informal care, and formal care interfaces; and health, education, and labor market outcomes over the life course. He received his MD (1997) and master of public health (2003) degrees from Seoul National University, subsequently completing his PhD in Health Policy and Management (2008) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was the inaugural Asia Health Policy postdoctoral fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center,(2008−9).