Opportunity costs of unpaid caregiving: Evidence from panel time diaries
Ray Miller and
Ashish Kumar Sedai
The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, 2022, vol. 22, issue C
Abstract:
We examine the association between unpaid adult and child 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 to establish the causal effects of caregiving.
Keywords: Unpaid care; Time-use; Aging; Gender inequality; Home production; Personal care (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J14 J16 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212828X22000196
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:eee:joecag:v:22:y:2022:i:c:s2212828x22000196
DOI: 10.1016/j.jeoa.2022.100386
Access Statistics for this article
The Journal of the Economics of Ageing is currently edited by D.E. Bloom, A. Sousa-Poza and U. Sunde
More articles in The Journal of the Economics of Ageing from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().