Parent-Child Relationships, Intergenerational Transfers, and the Residential Mobility in Later Life: A Three-Generation Perspective

For older adults, internalized commitments through kinship may play a significant role in pooling resources for services from household chores to integrated care. If aging parents are asked to receive assistance from children or offer help to older parents, their mobility decisions are likely to be affected by the proximity to these family members. Despite the evidence of the link between parent-child relationships and residential choices, a few studies to date have examined kinship and financial support across three generations as determinants of the mobility of the elderly. Relying on data from the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging (KLoSA), this study estimates panel logit models to explore how both kinship and financial support shape the residential trajectories of the elderly. We find that strong kinship tends to increase the likelihood of seniors’ moving toward older parents while financial help may substitute such effect. Our findings provide important implications for senior healthcare and housing policies.