IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp15369.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Caring for Carers? The Effect of Public Subsidies on the Wellbeing of Unpaid Carers

Author

Listed:
  • Costa-Font, Joan

    (London School of Economics)

  • D’Amico, Francesco

    (CEP, London School of Economics)

  • Vilaplana-Prieto, Cristina

    (Universidad de Murcia)

Abstract

We study the effect of long-term care (LTC) subsidies and supports on the wellbeing of unpaid caregivers. We draw on evidence from a policy intervention, that universalized previously means-tested caregiving supports in Scotland, known as free personal care (FPC). We document causal evidence of an increase in the well-being (happiness) of unpaid carers after the introduction of FPC. Our estimates suggest economically relevant improvements in the happiness (12pp increase in subjective wellbeing) among caregivers exposed to FPC and that provide at least 35 hours of care per week. Consistently, these results are larger among women and non-actively employed caregivers (17pp increase in happiness). Estimates are not driven by selection into caregiving (we find similar wellbeing effects among caregivers at baseline and caregivers throughout the sample), and are driven by income effects of FPC among caregivers.

Suggested Citation

  • Costa-Font, Joan & D’Amico, Francesco & Vilaplana-Prieto, Cristina, 2022. "Caring for Carers? The Effect of Public Subsidies on the Wellbeing of Unpaid Carers," IZA Discussion Papers 15369, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp15369
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp15369.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Joan Costa-Font & Sergi Jiménez & Cristina Vilaplana Prieto & Analía Viola, 2022. "Long-term Care in Spain," Studies on the Spanish Economy eee2022-23, FEDEA.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    caregiving; long-term care subsidies; subjective wellbeing; caregiver's wellbeing; Scotland;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J22 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Time Allocation and Labor Supply

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp15369. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Holger Hinte (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaade.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.