Can Policy Change Culture? Government Pension Plans and Traditional Kinship Practices
American Economic Review · 2021 · Volume 111 · Issue 6
Abstract
Policies may change the incentives that allow cultural practices to persist. To test this, I study matrilocality and patrilocality, kinship traditions that determine daughters' and sons' post-marriage residences, and thus, which gender lives with and supports parents in their old age. Two separate policy experiments in Ghana and Indonesia show that pension policies reduce the practice of these traditions. I also show that these traditions incentivize parents to invest in the education of children who traditionally coreside with them. Consequently, when pension plans change cultural practices, they also reduce educational investment. This finding further demonstrates that policy can change culture.
Keywords
Household Finance: Household Saving, Borrowing, Debt, and Wealth, Education and Research Institutions: General, Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants, Non-labor Discrimination, Economics of Gender, Nonwage Labor Costs and Benefits, Retirement Plans, Private Pensions, Economic Sociology, Economic Anthropology, Language, Social and Economic Stratification
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