Estimating the Cost of Informal Care with a Novel Two-Stage Approach to Individual Synthetic Control

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Petrillo, Maria, Valdenegro, Daniel, Rahal, Charles, Zhang, Yanan, Pryce, Gwilym, Bennett, Matthew R.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910712062803968
author Petrillo, Maria
Valdenegro, Daniel
Rahal, Charles
Zhang, Yanan
Pryce, Gwilym
Bennett, Matthew R.
author_facet Petrillo, Maria
Valdenegro, Daniel
Rahal, Charles
Zhang, Yanan
Pryce, Gwilym
Bennett, Matthew R.
contents Informal carers provide the majority of care for people living with challenges related to older age, long-term illness, or disability. However, the care they provide often results in a significant income penalty for carers, a factor largely overlooked in the economics literature and policy discourse. Leveraging data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, this paper provides the first robust causal estimates of the caring income penalty using a novel individual synthetic control based method that accounts for unit-level heterogeneity in post-treatment trajectories over time. Our baseline estimates identify an average relative income gap of up to 45%, with an average decrease of £162 in monthly income, peaking at £192 per month after 4 years, based on the difference between informal carers providing the highest-intensity of care and their synthetic counterparts. We find that the income penalty is more pronounced for women than for men, and varies by ethnicity and age.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_10314
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Estimating the Cost of Informal Care with a Novel Two-Stage Approach to Individual Synthetic Control
Petrillo, Maria
Valdenegro, Daniel
Rahal, Charles
Zhang, Yanan
Pryce, Gwilym
Bennett, Matthew R.
General Economics
Economics
Methodology
Informal carers provide the majority of care for people living with challenges related to older age, long-term illness, or disability. However, the care they provide often results in a significant income penalty for carers, a factor largely overlooked in the economics literature and policy discourse. Leveraging data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, this paper provides the first robust causal estimates of the caring income penalty using a novel individual synthetic control based method that accounts for unit-level heterogeneity in post-treatment trajectories over time. Our baseline estimates identify an average relative income gap of up to 45%, with an average decrease of £162 in monthly income, peaking at £192 per month after 4 years, based on the difference between informal carers providing the highest-intensity of care and their synthetic counterparts. We find that the income penalty is more pronounced for women than for men, and varies by ethnicity and age.
title Estimating the Cost of Informal Care with a Novel Two-Stage Approach to Individual Synthetic Control
topic General Economics
Economics
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10314