Divorce, Remarriage and Intergenerational Transfers from Parents to Adult Children in Mexico: A Comparison with the United States

Megan M. Way, Babson College

How do divorce and remarriage correlate with the financial support older Mexican parents give their adult children, and how does this compare with patterns of giving in the United States? This paper uses the Mexican Health and Aging Study (2001) to examine the relationship between parents’ marital status and inter-vivos giving to adult children, and compares the results to similar US data. It finds that in Mexico, like in the US, divorced fathers who are not remarried are more likely to give to their adult children, both unconditionally and conditioning on other socioeconomic variables, than any other parental category. Remarried fathers give slightly more than remarried mothers to children of a former union in Mexico, unlike in the US, where remarried fathers give much less than mothers. The implications of the results are discussed in light of the vastly different marital demographics in Mexico and the US.