Rotten Adult‑Kid Problem

When adult children delay having kids to maximize their own payoffs, they impose an external cost on their parents by cutting the parents’ healthy years available for grandparental care and transfers. That raises the market price of informal care and raises wealth per grandchild, with the effects concentrated among higher‑educated families. — This reframes fertility timing as an intergenerational externality with economic consequences for care markets, inequality, and social policy (childcare, eldercare, leave, and transfer design).