Informal Caregiving, Employment Status and Work Hours of the 50+ Population in Europe

Abstract

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.

The Kids are Alright - Labour Market Effects of Unexpected Parental Hospitalisations in the Netherlands

“…At the intensive margin, they find a reduction of 3-10 working hours per week with a 3 percentage point wage reduction, but no effect for men. More relevant to our setting, Ciccarelli and Van Soest (2018) provide recent evidence for Europe and instrument informal caregiving with the death of a parent, poor health of a parent, and distance to the mother's residence. They find that daily caregiving significantly reduces the probability of being employed and the number of hours of paid work, especially for females.…”

What is the marginal benefit of payment‐induced family care? Impact on Medicaid spending and health of care recipients

“…From a narrow perspective of public payment, informal care is a vastly cheaper alternative, because it is provided "for free" by family and friends. However, researchers have pointed out that from a societal perspective, unpaid care incurs substantial costs, once one includes the labor market and health effects on the care providers themselves (recent examples include Ciccarelli & Van Soest, 2018;Coe, Skira, & Larson, 2018;Skira, 2015;Van Houtven, Coe, & Skira, 2013). Indeed, Skira (2015) and Coe et al (2018) estimate the welfare costs of informal care to be roughly equivalent to the cost of a nursing home.…”

Life course partnership and employment trajectories and parental caregiving at age 55: prospective findings from a British Birth Cohort Study

“…That provision of care to someone within the household increases the likelihood that carers will leave employment is well-known (Carr et al, 2016;Evandrou & Glaser, 2003), and that providing long hours of care or daily care is particularly associated with labour market exits (Ciccarelli & Van Soest, 2018;Gomez-Leon, Evandrou, Falkingham & Vlachantoni, 2017;Kelle, 2018;Walsh & Murphy, 2018), including through retirement (Jacobs, Van Houtven, Laporte & Coyte, 2017) or a reductions in hours (Ciccarelli & Van Soest, 2018). The type of care provided also matters, with the provision of personal care more strongly associated with exits from employment than other types of care provision, particularly for women (Gomez-Leon et al, 2017).…”

“…This may be due to greater care demands involved in personal care, but also because personal care tasks have been shown to be more 'time-bound' and less shiftable than other forms of care (Hassink & Van den Berg, 2011;Van Houtven et al, 2013). Some studies suggest that women are more likely than men to reduce work hours or exit labour market in response to caregiving (Carr et al, 2016;Ciccarelli & Van Soest, 2018) although others, in Australia and the UK, find that men and women are equally likely to leave employment in response to intense caregiving (Gomez-Leon et al, 2017;Nguyen & Connelly, 2014). In the US, employed women providing care have been shown to work fewer hours and received lower wages than non-caregiving female workers and the same was not true for men (Van Houtven et al, 2013).…”