The effect of unemployment on care provision

Abstract

In this paper we estimate the effect of unemployment on informal care provision. For the identification we use plant closures as a source of exogenous variation and combine difference-in-differences with matching based on entropy balancing. The analysis is based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We find that there is a time conflict between employment and informal care provision. Unemployment increases the probability of providing care by 2.9 percentage points while the daily hours of care provision rise by around 0.05 h per week-day. Both men and women react with significant increases in care provision. We find the largest effects for women with low education.