Time-bound opportunity costs of informal care: Consequences for access to professional care, caregiver support, and labour supply estimates

Abstract

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Well-being losses due to care-giving

“…Therefore, actual time spent caring may be higher than the survey results indicate. Also, our informal care measures do not capture the timing of care (Hassink and Van den Berg, 2011). Providing a few hours of informal care during the weekends may have a different impact on carer wellbeing compared with for instance a similar total amount of care but provided on a daily base which is something future research could try to capture.…”

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

“…These instruments are criticized on the grounds that a dummy variable or metric measurement of care hours is unable to sufficiently capture a heterogeneous care task. Hassink and Van den Berg (2011), for instance, argue that ignoring the fact that some care task are "time-bounded" while others can be shifted from one day to another can affect the exclusion restriction in the instrumented regressions and thus provide biased estimates. Doubts about the use of care needs as an instrument have already been raised by Heitmueller (2007).…”

The effect of informal care on work and wages

“…Some care tasks, such as assistance with chores, are shiftable over the day or even in between days, while personal care likely contains unshiftable activities that need to be provided at specific times in the day. There may be opportunity costs associated not only with a larger time commitment, but also from non-shiftable caregiving tasks (Hassink and Van den Berg, 2011). Thus, we distinguish between types of care in our analysis, as well as the intensity of care provided.…”