Peter Eibich (Université Paris Dauphine-PSL & GLO) and Emma Xianhua Zai (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research & GLO) receive the 2025 Kuznets Prize for their OPEN ACCESS article “Are the grandparents alright? The health consequences of grandparental childcare provision“, which was published in the Journal of Population Economics (2024), 37, article 71. The annual prize of a year honors the best article published in the Journal of Population Economics in the previous year.
The prize will be awarded in a public online event during the 2024 GLO – JOPE Global Conference on December 5, 2024 on 15:00 – 16.00 (3-4pm) CET Berlin. For the program and to register for the event see LINK.
More information about the Kuznets Prize & previous prize winners.
Biographical Abstracts
Peter Eibich is professor of economics at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL. His research interests include the economics of aging and retirement, preventive care, and family economics. He has conducted substantial work on examining how the transition into retirement affects the lives of older adults, and how family ties affect health and labour market outcomes across generations. He has also extensively collaborated with researchers across the health and social sciences. Prof. Eibich holds a Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg and has previously worked
at the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute of Demographic Research.
Xianhua Zai (Emma) is a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) and the Max Planck – University of Helsinki Center for Social Inequalities in Population Health. Her research focuses on the intersections of aging, long-term care, health disparities, and health policy, with a strong emphasis on improving overall well-being. She utilizes large-scale secondary, registry, and administrative datasets to address critical questions that inform health policies and promote equitable care solutions. Her work spans areas such as aging and health, the design and impact of long-term care systems, and the social determinants of health. Dr. Zai holds a Ph.D from the Ohio State University.
Paper Abstract
This paper examines the causal effect of childcare provision on grandparents’ health in the United States. We use the sex ratio among older adults’ children as an instrument for grandparental childcare provision. Our instrument exploits that parents of daughters transition to grandparenthood earlier and invest more in their grandchildren than parents of sons. We estimate 2SLS regressions using data from the Health and Retirement Study. The results suggest that providing childcare is detrimental to grandparents’ physical functioning and subjective health. We show that these effects increase with the intensity of grandchild care provision, and the effects are driven primarily by grandmothers.
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