Liberated from care: Long-term care insurance policy and Employment for women

In the context of an increasingly aging population, this paper examines the economic incentives of long-term care insurance policies for women to disengage from informal care responsibilities within the household. Through constructing both theoretical analytical frameworks and empirical identification strategies, we seek to comprehend the causal relationship between women benefiting from long-term care insurance policy pilot programs and their entry or re-entry into the labor market. Our findings indicate that long-term care insurance policies significantly stimulate female employment. This discovery implies that aiding women in shifting family responsibilities to the market contributes to enhancing female labor participation. Robustness checks corroborate our findings, and the outcomes of competitive hypotheses demonstrate that alleviating family care burdens is more conducive to promoting female employment than providing care job opportunities. Further analysis suggests that long-term care insurance policies may also potentially undermine China's "raising children to support old age" mechanism and the preference for sons over daughters. However, there exist heterogeneities concerning enhancing women's bargaining power in both the household and society.