Intergenerational transfers and China's social security reform

Most of the studies examining the implications of social security reforms in China use overlapping generations models and abstract from the role of family support. However, in China, family support plays a prominent role in the well-being of the elderly and often substitutes for the lack of government-provided old-age support systems. In this paper, we investigate the impact of social security reform in China in a model with two-sided altruism as well as a pure life-cycle model. We show that the quantitative implications of social security reform, in particular for capital accumulation and output, are very different across the two models.