Does grandchild care influence grandparents’ self-rated health? Evidence from a fixed effects approach

Merih Ates

Social Science & Medicine, 2017, vol. 190, issue C, 67-74

Abstract: The present study aims to identify, whether and how supplementary grandchild care is causally related to grandparents' self-rated health (SRH). Based on longitudinal data drawn from the German Aging Survey (DEAS; 2008–2014), I compare the results of pooled OLS, pooled OLS with lagged dependant variables (POLS-LD), random and fixed effects (RE, FE) panel regression. The results show that there is a positive but small association between supplementary grandchild care and SRH in POLS, POLS-LD, and RE models. However, the fixed effects model shows that the intrapersonal change in grandchild care does not cause a change in grandparents' SRH. The FE findings indicate that supplementary grandchild care in Germany does not have a causal impact on grandparents' SRH, suggesting that models with between-variation components overestimate the influence of grandchild care on grandparents’ health because they do not control for unobserved (time-constant) heterogeneity.

Keywords: Grandchild care; Grandparents' health; German Aging Survey (DEAS); Longitudinal; Fixed effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:190:y:2017:i:c:p:67-74

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DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.08.021

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