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
