Are the grandparents alright? The health consequences of grandparental childcare provision

Peter Eibich and Xianhua Zai
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Peter Eibich: Legos - Laboratoire d'Economie et de Gestion des Organisations de Santé - Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, LEDa - Laboratoire d'Economie de Dauphine - IRD - Institut de Recherche pour le Développement - Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Xianhua Zai: MPIDR - Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research - Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

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Abstract: This paper examines the causal effect of childcare provision on grandparents' health in the United States. We use the sex ratio among older adults' children as an instrument for grandparental childcare provision. Our instrument exploits that parents of daughters transition to grandparenthood earlier and invest more in their grandchildren than parents of sons. We estimate 2SLS regressions using data from the Health and Retirement Study. The results suggest that providing childcare is detrimental to grandparents' physical functioning and subjective health. We show that these effects increase with the intensity of grandchild care provision, and the effects are driven primarily by grandmothers.

Keywords: Grandparents; Childcare provision; Instrumental variables; Health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Published in Journal of Population Economics, 2024, 37 (4), ⟨10.1007/s00148-024-01044-5⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04870020

DOI: 10.1007/s00148-024-01044-5

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