Determinants of Intergenerational Family Solidarity during the Great Recession: the Spanish Case.

Abstract

In the context of an economic crisis that has affected countries in Southern Europe especially and that has called into question the public pillar of the intergenerational contract, i.e. pensions, literature has shown an increasing interest in analyzing the other intergenerational pillar, which is largely based on family solidarity and which has been insufficiently explored for the Spanish case. Therefore, based on official data provided by the Time Use Survey (TUS) and the Household Budget Survey (HBS), an effort has been made to identify, through multivariate models, the individual factors that determined certain expressions of family solidarity and their participation and intensity of time and money transfers among family members in one of the most critical moments of this crisis in Spain (2009/2010). The results question the idea that the unemployed and the retired have been net recipients during the crisis, revealing that it is insufficient to consider only a single manifestation of solidarity, the financial one, when accounting for the wide range of support and transfers that circulate among family members.