Labour supply and informal care responses to health shocks within couples: evidence from the UKHLS

Annarita Macchioni Giaquinto, Andrew Jones, Nigel Rice and Francesca Zantomio

No 806, GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO)

Abstract: Shocks to health have been shown to reduce labour supply for the individual affected. Less is known about household self-insurance through a partner's response to a health shock. Previous studies have presented inconclusive empirical evidence on the existence of a healthrelated 'added worker effect'. We use UK longitudinal data to investigate within households both the labour supply and informal care responses of an individual to the event of an acute health shock to their partner. Relying on the unanticipated timing of shocks, we combine coarsened exact matching and entropy balancing algorithms with parametric analysis and exploit lagged outcomes to remove bias from observed confounders and time-invariant unobservables. We find no evidence of a health-related 'added worker effect'. A significant and sizeable increase in spousal informal care, irrespective of spousal labour market position or household financial status and ability to purchase formal care provision, suggests a substitution to informal care provision, at the expense of time devoted to leisure activities.

Keywords: health shocks; added worker effect; labour supply; informal care; matching methods; panel data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 I10 I13 J14 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/232259/1/GLO-DP-0806.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Labour supply and informal care responses to health shocks within couples: evidence from the UKHL (2021)
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:zbw:glodps:806

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().