Who cares?

Abstract

Around the world, many people provide informal care next to a paid job. Sometimes only for months, sometimes even for years. This paper focuses on a special type of informal care; caregiving to family or friends, a rather obligatory task which is unpaid and which has to be carried out next to a paid job. In this paper, we analyze the effects of caregiving upon several labor market aspects. According to our hypotheses, caregiving yields negative effects upon hours worked and productivity and people who give care work more often part-time. However, further research shows that these negative effects of caregiving disappear when we control for either the number of household members (hours worked) or sex (productivity, parttime).