An interesting study from Kolodziej et al. (2018) using the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) data. They aim to measure what happens to adults’ labor force participation when they provide informal care to their parents.
To offset the problem of endogeneity, we exploit the availability of other potential caregivers within the family as predictors of the probability to provide care for a dependent parent…Results reveal a negative causal effect that indicates that informal care provision reduces labor force participation by 14.0 percentage points (95 percent CI: −0.307, 0.026). Point estimates suggest that the effect is larger for men; however, this gender difference is not significantly different from zero at conventional levels.
The impact of adult parents poor health on adult children’s lives is often an overlooked burden that disease–especially chronic disease–imposes on families.
Source:
- Kolodziej, Ingo WK, Arndt R. Reichert, and Hendrik Schmitz. “New Evidence on Employment Effects of Informal Care Provision in Europe.” Health services research (2018).