No abstract

No abstract

This paper tests for the motives for private income transfers. We consider two motives: altruism and exchange. The question of private-transfer motives is important because such motivation can influence the effects of public income transfers on the distribution of income. Using a household survey for Peru, we find that transfer amounts received increase with recipient pre-transfer income, which contradicts a key prediction of the strong form of the altruism hypothesis but is consistent with exchange. We also find that capital market imperfections are likely to be an important cause of private transfers, and that social security benefits "crowd out" the incidence of private transfers.

on Aging. We would like to thank Richard Arnott and Andrew Foster for valuable comments on a previous draft. We also wish to thank seminar participants at the RAND Corporation, University of Southern California and the 1997 Northeast Universities Development Consortium for useful comments on earlier drafts. Homi Kharas provided us with the FIES data set. A GAUSS program which replicates the empirical work can be obtained at www.ssc.wisc.edu/~bhansen. Hansen thanks the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation for research support. The views expressed here are the authors' own and should not be attributed to the Government of the Philippines.

No abstract