A tale of trade-offs: the impact of macroeconomic factors on environmental concern.

Objective: We test whether macroeconomic conditions affect individuals' willingness to pay for environmental quality improvements.

Background: Improvements in environmental quality, like everything, come at a cost. Individuals facing difficult economic times may be less willing to make trade-offs required for improvements in environmental quality.

Beyond solidarity, reciprocity and altruism: moral capital as a unifying concept in intergenerational support for older people.

The purpose of this article is to review, contrast and synthesise several major intellectual streams that have guided theoretical development and empirical research in the area of intergenerational family support to older people: (a) normative-integrative approaches that focus on cohesion between family members based on bonds of solidarity and norms of filial obligation, and (b) transactional approaches that are primarily concerned with identifying motives for resource transfers across generational lines. We propose the concept of moral capital - defined as the stock of internalised social norms that obligate children to care for and support their older parents - the transmission of which lies at the intersection of self-interest (for parents) and altruism (for children). Using data from a multigenerational family study, we present an empirical analysis showing that a strong positive correspondence in the filial obligations of adult children and their older mothers - arguably the result of intergenerational transmission - elevated the supportive behaviour of children.

Reciprocity in parent-child relations over the adult life course.

Objectives: This research assessed how parents' transfers of sentiment, time, and financial assets to their adolescent/young adult children affect the children's propensity in middle age to provide social support to their aging parents. We tested whether the mechanism of long-term intergenerational exchange is better modeled as a return on investment, an insurance policy triggered by the longevity or physical frailty of parents, or the result of altruistic (or other nonreciprocal) motivations on the part of adult children.

Methods: Models were examined with 6 waves of data from the University of Southern California Longitudinal Study of Generations.