Does Formal Employment Reduce Informal Caregiving?

Daifeng He and Peter McHenry ()

Health Economics, 2016, vol. 25, issue 7, 829-843

Abstract: Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation, we examine the impact of formal employment on informal caregiving. We instrument for individual work hours with state unemployment rates. We find that, among women of prime caregiving ages (40–64 years), working 10% more hours per week reduces the probability of providing informal care by about 2 percentage points. The effects are stronger for more time‐intensive caregiving and if care recipients are household members. Our results imply that work‐promoting policies have the unintended consequence of reducing informal caregiving in an aging society. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.3185

Related works:
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:wly:hlthec:v:25:y:2016:i:7:p:829-843

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones

More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().