Short- and medium-term effects of informal care provision on health

This paper estimates the effect of informal care provision on female caregiver’s health. We use data from the German Socio-economic Panel and assess effects up to seven years after care provision. A simulation-based sensitivity analysis scrutinizes the sensitivity of the results with respect to potential deviations from the conditional independence assumption in the regression adjusted matching approach. The results suggest that there is a considerable short-term effect of informal care provision on mental health which fades out over time. Five years after care provision there are no significant effects left. Both short- and medium-term effects on physical health are much smaller and insignificant throughout.