How does caregiving influence employment and earnings? – Healthcare Economist

That is the query {that a} current NBER working paper by Nicole Maestas, Matt Messel, and Yulya Truskinovsky (2023) intention to reply. The authors use knowledge from the Survey of Earnings and Program Participation (SIPP) amongst particular person report offering unpaid care to household and pal. The SIPP knowledge are then linked to earnings knowledge from Social Safety Administration. People who present caregiving are matched with comparable people based mostly on demographics in addition to earnings/employment histories. Utilizing this method the authors discover the next outcomes by gender:

Earlier than ladies begin offering care, there isn’t any distinction of their employment or earnings trajectories and people of non-caregivers or future caregivers. Nonetheless, within the three years after ladies start offering care, the employment of caregivers falls by 2.7 proportion factors (4 p.c) relative to the employment of future caregivers, or by 2.1 proportion factors relative to non-caregivers. The employment hole between caregivers and comparability teams narrows three to 5 years after care begins. The typical annual earnings of feminine caregivers fall by practically $1,000 (4 p.c) within the first three years after caregiving begins, relative to the earnings of future caregivers, and stays about $600 decrease in years three to 5, though the longer-term distinction shouldn’t be statistically important.

For males, the image is kind of totally different. The employment and earnings of male caregivers start to say no 5 or extra years earlier than males start to offer unpaid care, relative to the trajectories of male non-caregivers and future caregivers. After they start offering care, male caregivers expertise an extra employment decline of three.7 proportion factors (5 p.c) relative to the management group of future caregivers. Male caregivers keep out of the labor pressure longer than do feminine caregivers, because the employment hole between male caregivers and their management teams persists in years three to 5 fairly than narrows as seen for feminine caregivers.

You possibly can learn the NBER digest abstract right here and the total paper right here.