Working Paper: NBER ID: w19142
Authors: Young Kyung Do; Edward C. Norton; Sally Stearns; Courtney H. Van Houtven
Abstract: This study aims to measure the causal effect of informal caregiving on the health and health care use of women who are caregivers, using instrumental variables. We use data from South Korea, where daughters and daughters-in-law are the prevalent source of caregivers for frail elderly parents and parents-in-law. A key insight of our instrumental variable approach is that having a parent-in-law with functional limitations increases the probability of providing informal care to that parent-in-law, but a parent-in-law's functional limitation does not directly affect the daughter-in-law's health. We compare results for the daughter-in-law and daughter samples to check the assumption of the excludability of the instruments for the daughter sample. Our results show that providing informal care has significant adverse effects along multiple dimensions of health for daughter-in-law and daughter caregivers in South Korea.
Keywords: Informal caregiving; Health outcomes; Health care use; Instrumental variables; South Korea
JEL Codes: I1
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Parent-in-law ADL limitations (K36) | Informal caregiving (D13) |
| Informal caregiving (D13) | Caregiver health (daughter-in-law) (I11) |
| Informal caregiving (D13) | Caregiver health (daughter) (I19) |
| Informal caregiving (D13) | Out-of-pocket health care costs (daughter-in-law) (I11) |