Informal and Formal Care in Europe

Tarja Viitanen

No 2648, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Government expenditure on formal residential care and home-help services for the elderly significantly reduces 45-59 year old women’s informal care-giving affecting both the extensive and the intensive margin. Allowing for country fixed-effects and country-specific trends and correcting for attrition, the estimates – based on the European Community Household Panel – imply that a 1000 Euro increase in the government expenditure on formal residential care and home-help services for the elderly decreases the probability of informal care-giving outside of the caregiver’s household by 6 percentage points. Formal care substitutes for informal care that is undertaken outside of the carer’s own household, but does not substitute for intergenerational household formation. A simulation exercise shows that an increase in government formal care expenditure is a cost-effective way of increasing the labour force participation rates.

Keywords: informal care; formal care; ECHP; attrition bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J14 J2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2007-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-hea and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp2648.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: INFORMAL AND FORMAL CARE IN EUROPE (2007)
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:dp2648

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 ().