Standard homo economicus lives in a world of complete markets and maximizes utility which is a function of his personal consumption. This approximation cannot account for parents making transfers to adult children, children taking care of old parents, nor for gifts, inheritance and many other services exchanged within families. Such behavior can be derived from three main mechanisms. Firstly, in the so-called pure altruism model, the parent’s utility is augmented by the utility of his child. This leads to transfers from the parent to his child. An important feature of this model is the strong property of redistributive neutrality: since parents and child pool their income, any government transfer to one will be undone by the other adjusting his transfer.