Caregivers in the Family: Daughters, Sons and Social Norms

Francesca Barigozzi, Helmuth Cremer and Kerstin Roeder ()
Additional contact information
Kerstin Roeder: University of Augsburg

No 10862, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Daughters are the principal caregivers of their dependent parents. In this paper, we study long-term care (LTC) choices by bargaining families with mixed- or same-gender siblings. LTC care can be provided either informally by children, or formally at home or in an institution. A social norm implies that daughters suffer a psychological cost when they provide less informal care than the average child. We show that the laissez-faire (LF) and the utilitarian first-best (FB) differ for two reasons. First, because informal care imposes a negative externality on daughters via the social norm, too much informal care is provided in LF. Second, the weights children and parents have in the family bargaining problem might differ in general from their weights in social welfare. We show that the FB allocation can be achieved through a system of subsidies on formal home and institutional care. Except when children and parents have equal bargaining weights these subsidies are gender-specific and reflect Pigouvian as well as "paternalistic" considerations.

Keywords: daughters; formal and informal LTC; social norms; sons (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 H23 H31 I19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2017-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published - published in: European Economic Review, 130, 2020, 103589.

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp10862.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Caregivers in the family: Daughters, sons and social norms (2020)
Working Paper: Caregivers in the Family: Daughters, Sons and Social Norms (2020)
Working Paper: Caregivers in the family: daughters, sons and social norms (2017)
Working Paper: Caregivers in the family: daughters, sons and social norms (2017)
Working Paper: Caregivers in the family: daughters, sons and social norms (2017)
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:iza:izadps:dp10862

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().