Vol.:(0123456789) Economia Politica https://doi.org/10.1007/s40888-020-00181-w 1 3 ORIGINAL PAPER Money and time: what would you give back to me? Reciprocity between children and their elderly parents in Europe Fernanda Mazzotta 1  · Lavinia Parisi 1 Received: 24 October 2018 / Accepted: 16 April 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 Abstract Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) (2004, 2006, 2011, 2013 and 2015), we analyse the determinants of adult children’s transfers of money and time to their parents. Specifcally, we focus on reciprocity: analysing resource transfers, in term of both time (i.e., informal care) and money (i.e., fnancial transfers), helps us understand how parent-to-child transfers may infuence the probability of child-to-parent transfers. A multivariate probit model for 10 EU countries is used to simultaneously estimate the probabilities that informal care or fnancial transfers will be given by children to their parents and, conversely, by parents to their children. Using the longitudinal structure of the data, we consider both concurrent and intertemporal reciprocity. The evidence for reciprocity is dif- ferent based on the type of transfer: we do not fnd evidence of reciprocity for time transfers (informal care provided to parents) except in the case of sons, for which a positive link between informal care given to parents and current fnancial transfers received from parents emerges. In contrast, we fnd a positive efect of parent-to- child transfers (both time and money) on the probability of child-to-parent fnancial transfers. Keywords Informal care · Time transfers · Money Transfers · Reciprocity · Responsibility JEL classifcation D10 · I10 · D64 · J14 Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s4088 8-020-00181-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Fernanda Mazzotta mazzotta@unisa.it Lavinia Parisi laparisi@unisa.it 1 Department of Economics and Statistics, CELPE, University of Salerno, Via Giovanni Paolo II, 132, 84084 Fisciano, SA, Italy