Using panel data on the age group 50-70 in 15 European countries, we analyze the effects of providing informal care to parents, parents-in-law, stepparents, and grandparents on employment status and work hours. We account for fixed individual effects and test for endogeneity of caregiving using moments exploiting standard instruments (e.g., parental death) as well as higher-order moment conditions (Lewbel instruments). Specification tests suggest that informal care provision and daily caregiving can be treated as exogenous variables. We find a significant and negative effect of daily caregiving on employment status and work hours. This effect is particularly strong for women. On the other hand, providing care at a weekly (or less than weekly) frequency does not significantly affect paid work. We do not find evidence of heterogeneous effects of caregiving on paid work across European regions.

In this paper we derive a semiparametric efficient adaptive estimator for the GJR-GARCH {(1,1)} model. We first show that the quasi-maximum likelihood estimator is consistent and asymptotically normal for the model used in analysis, and we secondly derive a semiparametric estimator that is more efficient than the quasi-maximum likelihood estimator. Through Monte Carlo simulations, we show that the semiparametric estimator is adaptive for the parameters included in the conditional variance of the GJR-GARCH {(1,1)} model with respect to the unknown distribution of the innovation.

We analyze the effect of employer-sponsored health insurance premiums on employment and annual wages in the US using a county-level panel dataset for the period 2005-2010. Using variation in medical malpractice payments and variation in medical malpractice legislation over time and within states as the source of identifying variation in the health insurance premiums, we estimate the causal effects of rising health insurance premiums on employment and annual wages. We find that a 10% increase in premiums reduces employment by 1.1 percentage points, and leads to a statistically insignificant reduction of annual wages. Since US counties are characterized by a varying degree of private health insurance coverage, we also test whether the private health insurance coverage is a moderating variable for the relationship between the health insurance premiums and the labor market outcomes analyzed in this study. We find that rising premiums negatively affect the labor market conditions faced by US workers, especially in areas that are characterized by high private health insurance coverage.