Caring for Parents and Employment Status of European Mid-Life Women
Laura Crespo
Working Papers from CEMFI
Abstract:
In this paper we estimate the causal effect of providing “intensive” informal care to elderly parents on labour market participation decisions for European women who are themselves approaching retirement. In particular, we consider the frequency or intensity of this help and we focus on informal care provided in a daily or weekly basis. We use two different but comparable samples drawn from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) that provide complementary detailed information about daughters and parents. We obtain evidence about this question for two groups of European countries that strongly differ in terms of informal caregiving intensity within the immediate family and the use of formal care: the northern countries (Sweden, Denmark and The Netherlands), and the southern countries (Spain, Italy and Greece). The results show that the estimated effect of providing “intensive” informal care to elderly parents on the probability of labour participation is negative and large for both groups of countries. Furthermore, a substantially stronger effect is found when the “intensive” caregiving variable is treated as endogenous in the labour participation equation. This shows that the potential opportunity costs in terms of (reduced) employment associated with the provision of informal care by women are seriously underestimated under the exogeneity assumption of the caregiving regressor.
Date: 2006
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-eec, nep-hea and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (39)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cemfi.es/ftp/wp/0615.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cmf:wpaper:wp2006_0615
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from CEMFI Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Araceli Requerey ().