Caregivers in the Family: Daughters, Sons and Social Norms

Abstract

Daughters are the principal caregivers of their dependent parents. In this paper, we study long-term care (LTC) choices by bargaining families with mixed-or same-gender siblings. LTC care can be provided either informally by children, or formally at home or in an institution. A social norm implies that daughters su¤er a psychological cost when they provide less informal care than the average child.We show that the laissez-faire (LF) and the utilitarian …rst-best (FB) di¤er for two reasons. First, because informal care imposes a negative externality on daughters via the social norm, too much informal care is provided in LF. Second, the weights children and parents have in the family bargaining problem might di¤er in general from their weights in social welfare. We show that the FB allocation can be achieved through a system of subsidies on formal home and institutional care.Except when children and parents have equal bargaining weights these subsidies are gender-speci…c and re ‡ect Pigouvian as well as "paternalistic" considerations.JEL-Classi…cation: D13, H23, H31, I19

Estate division: equal sharing, exchange motives, and Cinderella effects

“…Excluding the north, about half of Sweden's geographic size (and 12% of the population), and a total of about 100 parishes yields an average sized parish of 107 km 2 , and a maximum distance of around 14 km. 11 Recent theoretical work by Barigozzi et al (2017) suggest that daughters are disproportionally involved in care for impaired parents because of social norms. could, therefore, be explained by daughters being compensated for their relative more extensive service provision (Cox 1987).…”

The Public Economics of Long‐term Care. A Survey of Recent Contributions

“…Barigozzi et al. () draw attention to the gender issues associated with social norms and in particular, to the fact that daughters are expected to be the main caregivers to their parents. This causes a utility cost to daughters who do not comply with this norm.…”