 The impact of informal care from children to their elderly parents on self-employment? Evidence from ChinaChen Zhu, Zhuo Jin and Chien-Chiang Lee () Economic Modelling, 2022, vol. 117, issue C Abstract: China is facing a demographic shift that the proportion of elderly is growing, and providing informal care to elderly people is important in explaining “labor market discrimination”, where reducing willingness to be self-employed is the core. Although earlier studies examined the informal care and labor participation nexus, few analyzed the effects of informal care on self-employment from perspective of opportunity cost and inter-generational support simultaneously. We first develop a theoretical model, predicting that informal care can bring both cost effect and support effect on self-employment. The predictions are then confirmed using dataset collected from Chinese General Social Survey. Particularly, the inhibition of informal care is more pronounced in the group that are women, having a working spouse, living in rural area and having young children. Thus, China needs to take additional steps to overcome the barriers keeping the elderly from enjoying pension assistance. Keywords: Self-employment; Inter-generational support; Risk bearing; Informal care; Opportunity cost (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecmode:v:117:y:2022:i:c:s026499932200311x DOI: 10.1016/j.econmod.2022.106074 Access Statistics for this article Economic Modelling is currently edited by S. Hall and P. Pauly More articles in Economic Modelling from Elsevier |
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