SOEP Brown Bag Seminar

We investigate if and how adverse life events – early widowhood, divorce, disability, job loss - trigger informal insurance responses in the form of intervivos gifts. Drawing from Dutch register data, we construct comprehensive panels comprising individuals undergoing such shocks in the period 2011-2017, and we analyse the patterns of gift receipt surrounding these events. We run separate event study and stacked differences-in-differences models for women and men. Our findings show that the number of people receiving gifts, as well as the amount they receive, increase following a shock, with early widowhood and divorce exhibiting particularly pronounced effects. These informal insurance responses mainly stem from parental transfers with discernible gender disparities, wherein women tend to receive slightly greater financial assistance compared to men.