No free lunch, buddy: housing transfers and informal care later in life

Previous empirical literature on intergenerational transfers of assets and services has mostly focused on the contemporary exchange or on the bequest motive. Differently, using Italian data, we provide evidence that parents who help their adult children with housing at the time of marriage are rewarded by higher chances of receiving informal care later in life. We show that this relation is robust to controlling for a wide set of individual and family characteristics and we discuss three possible explanations: (i) increased geographical distance; (ii) parents' reinforcement through support for the production of grandchildren; (iii) correlation with future nancial transfers.