FAMILY-STRUCTURE AND TRANSFER MEASURES IN THE HEALTH AND RETIREMENT STUDY - BACKGROUND AND OVERVIEW

This paper describes the rationale for and the measures of family stru cture and inter-vivos giving in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Of particular interest to the HRS is the extent to which transfers af fect the labor supply of donors, especially women. Because all childre n and parents are individually profiled, HRS data can be used to exami ne the joint allocation of space, time, and money among competing kin. Data on siblings of respondents,vith living parents provide further o pportunities to consider how adult children distribute the burden of p arent care among themselves. Using the baseline HRS, we describe the q uality of data on kin attributes and the correlations among family str uctures, transfers, and work.