Informal Care and the Great Recession

Joan Costa-Font, Martin Karlsson and Henning Øien ()
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Henning Øien: University of Oslo

No 1502, CINCH Working Paper Series from Universitaet Duisburg-Essen, Competent in Competition and Health

Abstract: Macroeconomic downturns can have an important impact on the availability of informal and formal long-term care. This paper investigates how the market for informal care changed during and after the Great Recession in Europe. We use data from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe, which includes a rich set of variables covering waves before and after the Great Recession. We find evidence of an increase in the availability of informal care and a reduction in the use of formal health services (doctor visits and hospital stays) after the economic downturn when controlling for year and country fixed effects. This trend is mainly driven by changes in care provision of individuals not cohabiting with the care recipient. We also find a small negative association between old-age health and crisis severity. The results are robust to the inclusion of individual characteristics, individual-specific effects and regionspecific time trends.

Keywords: long-term care; informal care; great recession; downturn; old age dependency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I18 J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2015-02, Revised 2015-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Informal Care and the Great Recession (2015)
Working Paper: Informal Care and the Great Recession (2015)
Working Paper: Informal care and the great recession (2015)
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