10月27日下午，对外经贸大学石雪竹助理教授以“The Role of Social Norms in Old-age Support: Evidence from China”为题做学术报告，与我院师生进行了在线学术交流。
报告会上，石老师就中国传统社会中社会规范“养儿防老”在实际养老中所起的支持作用进行讨论，通过相关国内外数据的比较，凸显出老龄化问题以及家庭养老支持的重要研究价值。该研究指出赡养老人的社会规范，经由间接利他和“同性别代际传递”两条渠道实现。巧妙利用CHARLS和CHFS的不同轮次和样本不同侧重点数据，使用工具变量法分别从两个渠道识别“父亲示范作用”和“母亲示范作用”的影响。同时，石老师还从数据和方法上检验了实证结论的稳健性以及相关竞争性假说。
我院张同龙教授和梁菲菲老师对报告中的一些实证细节与石老师进行了交流讨论，加深了大家对于研究问题的认识。在最后的交流环节，我院师生积极提问，石老师对其中的问题一一进行了详细解答。
接着，石老师与同学们分享了其宝贵的读博和学位论文写作经验。她以自己在伦敦政治经济学院的博士论文为范本，从研究问题的缘起、自身周边的观察以及行文所遇到的困难，实证中的挑战，一直到临近后期的关键点，甚至一些个人处理读博和写作压力的小窍门等，均做了细致分享。整个在线会议学术氛围浓厚，参会学生收获颇多。
报告人简介：石雪竹，对外经济贸易大学保险学院助理教授。2020年博士毕业于英国伦敦政治经济学院，获得经济学博士学位。研究方向：公共经济学和发展经济学，研究兴趣包括性别、社会保障、健康和养老等相关问题。
论文摘要：
Intergenerational old-age support within families is an important norm in developing countries, which typically lack comprehensive pension coverage. The transmission mechanism for this norm is potentially influenced by socioeconomic factors internal and external to the family, which the norm may in turn influence. This paper studies the inter-generational transmission of this social norm in China, focusing on the role of gender. The mechanism behind this transmission is that parents, by their provision of support to their elderly parents, shape their same-gender children's preference for future old-age support. Given that the gender ratio of Chinese children is not random, I use an interaction term of the timing of the ban on sex-selective abortions in China and the gender of the first-born child as the instrumental variable for the gender of the children to alleviate the possible endogeneity. The empirical results, using two Chinese datasets, show that parents with more same-gender children provide more support to their ageing parents than parents with more cross-gender ones, controlling for their household size. The father effect is more significant in rural subsamples, and the mother effect is mainly seen in the urban ones. The urban-rural difference in the results may indicate a normative shift accompanying economic and demographic changes.
文/图 张同龙
责任编辑 彭秋莲