Given higher family spending for education and the relative poverty rate in Japan, the recent (2013–2021) tax incentive for grandparents’ support for educational expenditures for children might widen opportunities offered to the younger generation. Using nationally representative data from the 2017 Keio Household Panel Survey (n = 502) and a double-hurdle model, this paper examined the associations between grandparents’ financial contributions and family expenditures for school age children’s education, controlling for family characteristics associated with such expenditures. Although examining just the period when the tax incentive is in effect limited the ability of this study to suggest the findings were related to the incentive, overall, variations in financial support from grandparents were not associated with family expenditures for children’s educations in the multivariate model. Although there was no evidence of an educational advantage from intergenerational transfers during the observation period, financial transfers from grandparents may have served as a substitute for the overall family expenditures for children’s education, thus potentially widening the opportunity gap among children.

鉴于日本家庭用于教育的支出较高，并且相对贫困率较高，最近（2013-2021年）针对祖父母支持儿童教育支出的税收优惠政策可能会扩大向年轻一代提供的机会。本文使用2017年庆应义Household家庭调查的全国代表性数据（n = 502）和双关卡模型，研究了祖父母的财政贡献与学龄儿童教育家庭支出之间的关联，控制了与此类支出相关的家庭特征。尽管仅考察税收优惠政策的有效期会限制本研究表明调查结果与税收优惠有关的能力，但总体而言，在多元模型中，祖父母的财政支持的差异与家庭子女教育的支出没有关系。尽管在观察期间没有证据表明代际转移带来了教育上的好处，但祖父母的财政转移可能已替代了儿童教育的家庭总支出，从而潜在地扩大了儿童之间的机会差距。