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Informal Care and Caregiver's Health

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  • Young Kyung Do
  • Edward C. Norton
  • Sally C. Stearns
  • Courtney Harold 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. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Suggested Citation

  • Young Kyung Do & Edward C. Norton & Sally C. Stearns & Courtney Harold Van Houtven, 2015. "Informal Care and Caregiver's Health," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 24(2), pages 224-237, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:hlthec:v:24:y:2015:i:2:p:224-237
    DOI: 10.1002/hec.3012
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    5. Van Houtven, Courtney Harold & Norton, Edward C., 2008. "Informal care and Medicare expenditures: Testing for heterogeneous treatment effects," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 27(1), pages 134-156, January.
    6. Angrist, Joshua D & Evans, William N, 1998. "Children and Their Parents' Labor Supply: Evidence from Exogenous Variation in Family Size," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 88(3), pages 450-477, June.
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    8. Bobinac, Ana & van Exel, N. Job A. & Rutten, Frans F.H. & Brouwer, Werner B.F., 2010. "Caring for and caring about: Disentangling the caregiver effect and the family effect," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 29(4), pages 549-556, July.
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    • I1 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health

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