Opportunity costs of unpaid caregiving: Evidence from panel time diaries

Ray Miller and Ashish Kumar Sedai

CAMA Working Papers from Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University

Abstract: We examine the association between unpaid caregiving by older Americans and time allocated to labor supply, home production, leisure, and personal care. After controlling for time-invariant heterogeneity using panel time diaries, we find that older caregivers reported reduced time allocated to each domain fairly evenly overall. However, women showed a stronger associated decline in personal care and labor supply while men showed stronger declines in time devoted to home production. Gendered differences are more pronounced with intensive and non-spousal care. Results highlight time-cost differentials that could be driving observed gender gaps in health and labor market outcomes among unpaid caregivers. The study also underscores the serious endogeneity concerns between caregiving and broader time allocation patterns and highlights the need for additional research.

Keywords: unpaid care; time-use; aging; gender inequality; home production; personal care (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2021-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-gen and nep-hea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cama.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/fil ... 21_miller_sedai0.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:een:camaaa:2021-43

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAMA Working Papers from Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Cama Admin ().