The grandparent effect: Does a new grandchild change how long you expect to live?

Date

2026-12-01

Author

Kibar, Zehra Sena

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This study examines the causal effect of being a first-time grandparent on individuals' subjective survival probabilities. Analyses are conducted using Waves 4–6 (2011–2015) of Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe data. The Callaway and Sant'Anna (2021) doubly robust difference-in-differences method, accounting for staggered treatment timing and heterogeneous effects, is applied. The findings indicate that the birth of the first grandchild reduces the standardized subjective survival probability by approximately 3.8 percentage points. Event study graphs show no significant difference in pre-treatment periods and reveal that the effect deepens over the observed two-to-three-year window. Heterogeneity analyses indicate that the effect persists across broad subgroups, with no group exhibiting a positive “rejuvenation” effect, and the findings remain robust under alternative estimators and specifications. Mechanism analyses further show that the affective, perceived-health, and role-strain channels remain unaffected while only the probability of retirement increases, leaving a rational updating of one's perceived life-cycle stage as the remaining channel, inferred by elimination rather than tested. The results suggest that the transition to grandparenthood, by reshaping subjective survival beliefs, can have substantial implications for economic behaviors such as saving, retirement, and consumption decisions.

Subject Keywords

Causal inference, Difference-in-differences, Grandparenthood transition, Life-cycle stage updating, Subjective survival expectations

URI

https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=105048978568&origin=inward
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/120947

Collections

Department of Statistics, Article