Private and public transfers: substitute or complement?

Abstract

The paper analyzes the relationship between private and public social transfers in Russia. The research relies on the data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS-HSE) carried out by the Higher School of Economics in 1994–2018. The household is the unit of the analysis, the method of logistic regression is applied. The study has shown that when a household receives public social transfers, it is less likely to receive private transfers. So, the findings appear to bear out the hypothesis that public transfers crowd out private transfers in Russia.

More Schooling, More Generous? Estimating the Effect of Education on Intergenerational Transfers†

“…Other than monetary mechanisms, education plays an important role in private transfer behavior, which implies that policy-makers should pay more attention to enhance social security benefits in the context of education expansion. Given the substitution between social security and private transfers (Nikolov and Bonci, 2020;Mironova and Shenshina, 2021), increasing average schooling would decrease private intergenerational transfers and, consequently, increase the economic burden of social security expenditure. This paper is also related to an accumulating literature on the long-term consequences of China's Great Famine (Peng, 1987;Chen and Zhou, 2007;Fan and Qian, 2015;Xu et al, 2016).…”