Care for elderly parents: do children cooperate?

Abstract

Do children cooperate when they decide to provide informal care to their elderly parent? This paper assesses whether a cooperative or non-cooperative model drives the caregiving decisions of children. Focusing on families with two children and one single parent, I use data from a survey of older adults in France to compare the predictive power of the two models. Results suggest that children are more likely to behave according to a non-cooperative model, and that a cooperative model overestimates the level of care received by the parents. I construct an indicator of the degree of non-cooperativeness between two children and explore the determinants of non-cooperation. Finally, I show that this indicator is positively correlated with the number of unmet needs the parent has. This latter result suggests that the current level of informal care provided to a parent appears to suffer from a public good problem and the lack of cooperativeness between children has detrimental consequences for the parent.