Informal Care and Labour Force Participation among Middle-Aged Women in Spain

Abstract

Informal care is today the form of support most commonly used by those who need other people in order to carry out certain activities that are considered basic (eating, dressing, taking a shower, etc.), in Spain and in most other countries in the region. The possible labour opportunity costs incurred by these informal carers, the vast majority of whom are middle-aged women, have not as yet been properly quantified in Spain. It is, however, crucially important to know these quantities at a time when public authorities appear to be determined to extend the coverage offered up to now as regards long-term care.In this context, we use the Spanish subsample of the European Community Household Panel (1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001) to estimate a dynamic ordered probit and so attempt to examine the effects of various types of informal care on labour behaviour. The results obtained indicate the existence of labour opportunity costs for those women who live with the dependent person they care for, but not for those who care for someone outside the household. Furthermore, whereas caregiving for more than a year has negative effects on labour force participation, the same cannot be said of those who "start caregiving" and "stop caregiving". JEL codes: J14, J2, I10

Impacts of family care for children and the elderly on women’s employment: evidence from rural China

“…The third type of research utilized panel data methods to control for endogeneity resulting from unobserved individual heterogeneity. For instance, simultaneous quantile regression methods with fixed effects or dynamic panel fixed effects models were employed to examine the relationship between caregiving and women's employment (Budig and Hodges, 2010;Casado et al, 2011).…”

“…This gives rise to the interesting fact that the elderly play dual roles as both care recipients and helpers for women in childcare. It is clear that caring for the elderly sometimes does not reduce rural women's work possibilities and hours, as studies have confirmed using data from Spain and other European countries that caring for the elderly did not reduce rural women's work hours (Bolin et al, 2008;Casado et al, 2011). On the other hand, based on the theory of division of family roles, mothers are considered ideal childcare recipients.…”

“…On the one hand, there is a strong emotional bond between rural women and the elderly. As China's population ages, rural women are influenced by the traditional division of gender roles in the family, resulting in them taking on most of the caregiving responsibilities for the elderly (Casado et al, 2011;Chen and Fan, 2016). Some studies have shown that caring for the elderly significantly reduced rural women's labor force participation rate for their employment (Bolin et al, 2008;Liu et al, 2010;Huang, 2012;Wu et al, 2017).…”

The Effect of Informal Caregiving on Labor Market Outcomes in South Korea

“…As Ettner (1995) points out, economic research had previously been more interested in child care and its effect on female labor supply than in elderly parent care, which plays an increasingly important role with population aging. In more recent years, the literature on this issue proliferated from Europe (Carmichael and Charles, 1998;Carmichael and Charles, 2003;Crespo, 2006;Heitmueller, 2007;Heitmueller and Inglis, 2007;Casado et al, 2007;Bolin et al, 2008).…”

“…Combining the methodological finding on state dependence on labor force participation, the policy implication is that informal caregiving could contribute ultimately to old-age poverty among females assuming caregiving responsibilities in their midlife. Casado et al (2007) also use the Spanish subsample of the ECHP to examine the effects of informal care on female labor force participation.…”