Abstract
Social norms and traditions matter in the pattern of intergenerational living arrangements. The nuclear family is the rule in Western countries, whereas the multigenerational household has been commonplace in East Asian countries such as Korea, China, and Japan. In these countries, it has been customary for married children, especially the eldest sons and their wives, to live with their parents. This custom arises from deep-rooted Confucian ideology that emphasizes the importance of maintaining the integrity of the generational lineage (Takagi, Silverstein, Research on aging, 28:473–92, 2006). Although the percentage of multigenerational households has declined precipitously, traditional family values and practices are still prevalent in various aspects of social life.
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Notes
- 1.
Related US studies have mainly focused on the relationship between parental care and employment decisions of adult daughters. Early studies were generally based on models of labor market participation and parental care that treated each decision as exogenous (Stone and Short 1990; White-Means 1992). Recent research has recognized the joint nature of these decisions and used instrumental variables to address the endogeneity problem (Wolf and Soldo 1994; Ettner 1995, 1996; Pezzin and Schone 1999). The results from these studies provide inconclusive evidence of labor supply in response to competing demands for women’s time.
- 2.
Refer to footnote 5 for the reason why we use the mid-2000 data rather than recent ones in this paper.
- 3.
Including married women who live with their own parents in the sample does not change the main results of this paper.
- 4.
Even in Western countries, patterns in intergenerational living arrangements show some differences. Young adults in North American and Northern European countries leave home before marriage, whereas young adults in Southern European countries stay at home until marriage (Manacorda and Moretti 2006; Giuliano 2007). Nonetheless, most married children in Western countries do not live with their parents.
- 5.
Son preference in childbearing is also prevalent in China (Arnold and Zhaoxiang 1986) and Korea (Park and Cho 1995). However, son preference in Korea has weakened during the past three decades and the sex ratio at birth has reached the natural level after 2010 (Choi and Hwang 2015). It is the main reason why this paper uses the sample in the mid-2000s.
- 6.
Asai et al. (2015) show that childcare availability has no effect on maternal employment because childcare has rapidly shifted from informal to formal ones.
- 7.
Because the Population and Housing Census of Korea includes single-member households, the percentage of coresidence is slightly lower than that in our KLIPS sample. If we exclude single-member households from the Census, the coresidence rate is 9.8%, which is very close to the rate in our sample.
- 8.
The inclusion of additional control variables used in Table 10.5 does not change results in columns (2) and (3).
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Chun, H., Kim, O.H., Lee, I. (2019). Intergenerational Living Arrangements and Labor Supply of Married Women. In: Hosoe, M., Ju, BG., Yakita, A., Hong, K. (eds) Contemporary Issues in Applied Economics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7036-6_10
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