Informal Eldercare across Europe: Estimates from the European Community Household Panel

Work and Well-Being of Informal Caregivers in Europe

“…3 For continental Europe, the effects of caregiving may not necessarily be the same since these countries have different welfare arrangements and the effect of caregiving on labour supply under different institutional settings is still ambiguous. Ciani (2012) finds small or insignificant negative effects on employment of co-residential caregiving, with a slightly larger effect in Southern European countries in some specifications, while Viitanen (2010) finds caregiving only significantly reduces women's employment probability in Germany. 4 Contrary, Crespo and Mira (2010) find a negligible effect of daily parental caregiving on employment in Northern and Central European countries but a 50% decline in the employment probability in Southern European countries.…”

Informal adult care and caregivers' employment in Europe

“…The lower bound is introduced to avoid dealing with endogeneity of the fertility decision, while the upper bound is justified as restricting the attention to working age individuals. In contrast to studies focused on women only (Casado-Marín et al, 2009;Viitanen, 2010;Crespo and Mira, 2010), I do not select by gender, because there is a non negligible proportion of men providing care. 13 This decision raises an important concern, that is the correlation between partners' care giving choices.…”

“…Part of the European literature (Casado-Marín et al, 2009;Michaud et al, 2010;Viitanen, 2010;Crespo and Mira, 2010) has focused on estimating some version of Eq. (6) where h it IC is replaced by a dummy IC it for the individual providing informal care…”

“…Some papers have used the ECHP to estimate the effect of IC on employment (Spiess and Schneider, 2003;Casado-Marín et al, 2009;Viitanen, 2010;Kotsadam, 2011), trying to account for timeinvariant unobserved heterogeneity and for state dependence in LS.…”

Impacts of Informal Caregiving on Caregiver Employment, Health, and Family

“…For Germany, Meng (2012), in an analysis of the effect of care hours in seven waves of the German Socio Economic Panel , finds no reduction in labor force participation. However, although Viitanen's (2010) analysis of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) initially identifies Germany as the only one among 13 European countries that has a significant caregiving-work relation, once the state dependency of labor force participation and individual fixed-effects are controlled for, this negative impact falls to only 0.3 percentage points. For Canada, Lilly et al (2010) obtain only small, slightly significant effects for their male sample and conclude that the net effect of caregiving on employment is not significant.…”