Citation:
Heizler, O. ; Kimhi, A. . The Role Of Children In Building Parents’ Social Networks. In Social Economics: Current and Emerging Avenues; Mit Press, 2017; pp. 283–304.
Abstract:
Fertility is one of the most important decisions that a household makes. The economic literature has examined numerous aspects of fertility decisions: the optimal number of children, the tradeoff between quantity and quality of children, intergenerational transfers, old-age security and intra-family insurance, the effect of children on parents’ labor supply, the effect of children on parents’ marital stability, and so on (Browning 1992). However, despite the emerging economic literature on the important role played by social networks in various aspects of economic behavior (Jackson 2005; Birke 2009), little is known about the effect of family composition in general, and children