New Evidence on Employment Effects of Informal Care Provision in Europe

Abstract

Results apply to individuals whose consideration in long-term care policy is highly relevant, that is, children whose willingness to provide informal care to their parents is altered by available alternatives of family caregivers.

Unpaid Caregiving and Labour Force Participation among Chinese Middle-aged Adults

“…We used three instrumental variables for weekly caregiving hours, including the number of grandchildren aged below 16; whether the husband's father was widowed; and whether the wife's father was widowed. These instruments are established in the international literature [2,11,28,30] and meet the required assumptions [31]: (1) as Chinese adults are legally obligated to support and take care of their elderly parents [32] and likely to take on the parental role of their grandchildren [7], it is therefore reasonable to assume that individuals tasked with heavy unpaid caregiving duties at home (captured by the three instruments) would tend to allocate more time to unpaid caregiving in order to fulfil their obligations; (2) the three instruments are not correlated with LFP as prior literature based in developing countries [33][34][35] has identified the determinants of LFP to be education attainment and external factors such as urban location.…”

“…We extracted the following person-level characteristics from the survey that previously were identified in the literature [2,[27][28][29] to influence the decisions to participate in the labour market and the intensity of caregiving at home: age (years), marital status (currently married vs. not married), highest education (illiterate or primary/elementary school, middle school, high school, or college and above), area of residence (urban vs. rural), having work-limiting health conditions (yes vs. no), household size (i.e., numbers of people in the household; between 1-12), and monthly income of spouse. In sensitivity analysis, we introduced two more covariates, including whether the individual held an urban or rural Hukou (household registration) and the household income.…”

“…Although in the theoretical model proposed by Van Houtven et al [8] caregiving hours are considered exogenous, we used instrumental variables to statistically rule out the potential for inverse causality and unmeasured confounding while embedding a maximized likelihood-based procedure to identify a significant caregiving threshold. The popularity of instrumental variables is well established in the health economics literature and at least five studies have applied this technique to understand the causal role of unpaid caregiving on labour market outcomes [2,11,28,30,43]. However, there is a paucity of work that jointly use instrumental variables and a selective procedure to detect thresholds [47].…”

Bringing Invisible Partners in Care out of the Shadows: Employment Effects of Informal Care Provision in Europe and Implications for the United States

“…Importantly, Kolodziej, Reichert, and Schmitz (), control for the nonrandom selection into caregiving, focusing on the full age range of working age adult children caregivers (20–65), and using data from most countries in Europe, their generous sample size allows them to look at whether male and female caregivers have differential labor market responses. The data source is the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe from 2004–2013, modeled after the U.S. Health and Retirement Study.…”

“…The data source is the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe from 2004–2013, modeled after the U.S. Health and Retirement Study. Kolodziej, Reichert, and Schmitz () examine immediate changes in labor force participation for caregivers of older parents who have a demonstrated need compared to noncaregivers. Demonstrated need for care was defined by either receiving some informal or formal help in the home or reporting a disability and is important to keep in mind because many other studies include a broader sample of potential care recipients, for example, not restricting the analysis to those who have disability.…”