Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the title of a paper from Costa-Font and Vilaplana-Prieto (2025). They find the the value is very large indeed. Relative to a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the value of IC [informal care] ranges between 4.2% in France and 0.85% in Germany. Such relative value declines as the country’s share of formal LTC…
This is the subtitle of a study by Rebaudo et al. (2024) that aims to examine how different factors impact individual willingness to provide caregiving. The study is focused on potential caregivers in Germany. Before we get to the statistical analysis, first some background: Informal Caregiving in Germany The article provides a nice summary of…
The term “Carer QALY” was coined in a paper by Mott et al. (2023) and is identified as the case where “it is possible for an effective treatment that provides survival gains (with relatively little or no QOL gain) to appear less effective than the comparators when carer QOL is considered.” While the term “Carer…
This is the question that a recent NBER working paper by Nicole Maestas, Matt Messel, and Yulya Truskinovsky (2023) aim to answer. The authors use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) among individual report providing unpaid care to family and friend. The SIPP data are then linked to earnings data from…
Is caregiving by family members superior to paid home health caregiving? According to a paper by Coe et al. (2019), the answer is ‘yes’. We find that some family involvement in home‐based care significantly decreases health‐care utilization: lower likelihood of emergency room use, Medicaid‐financed inpatient days, any Medicaid hospital expenditures, and fewer months with Medicaid‐paid…
Poor health does not just affect the patient, but also the caregiver who provide physicial, emotional and financial support for these patients. To measure the impact of a disease on patient quality of life, there are a number of metrics one can choose from such as EQ-5D-5L, EQ-5D-VAS, SF-36 among others. Some of these surveys…
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…
Clearly, the care family members provide for sick relatives add significant value to the life of the infirm. Many non-economists may consider the cost of this care as “free” because family members typically are not paid for this services. However, nothing could be further from the truth. If family members were not caring for their…