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The support for the elderly is facing big challenges with the problem of population aging. Transfers from adult children could partly insure elderly parents against low income and high medical expenditure. There are two main motives for transfers in the literature, namely altruism and exchange. Using data from a new household survey of people aged 45 and above in China, we estimate the transfer derivatives with the adjustment of medical expenditure in elderly parents’ income. We find a large negative impact of adjusted income on transfers at the lower end of income distribution, which is consistent with the altruistic motive. Evidence on the exchange motive is found only for sons, but not for daughters. In addition, there is evidence on the “exchange-for-service” motive, which interprets transfer as a payment to parents’ family services, such as taking care of grandchildren.

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In this paper, we examine the impact of family size on maternal health outcomes by exploiting the tremendous change in family size under the One-Child policy in China. Using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey 1993-2006, we find that mothers with fewer children have a higher calorie intake and a lower probability of being underweight and having low blood pressure; meanwhile, they have a higher probability of being overweight. This would occur if a smaller family size increases the food consumption of mothers, leading underweight women to attain a normal weight and normal weight women becoming overweight. Robust tests are performed to provide evidence on the hypothesis that the tradeoff between children's quantity and mother's "quality" is through a budget constraint mechanism, that is, having more children decreases the resource allocated to mothers and affects their health outcomes.