Intergenerational family caregiving in welfare policy context

Definition Intergenerational family caregiving refers to exchanges up and down family lines aimed at nurturing the needs of others. Caregiving is more than a task; it involves emotional and relationship work

Older adult loneliness: myths and realities

The focus in this paper is on the social domain of quality of life, and more particularly loneliness. The empirical literature on older adult loneliness is reviewed, thereby challenging three often-held assumptions that figure prominently in public debates on loneliness. The first assumption that loneliness is a problem specifically for older people finds only partial support. Loneliness is common only among the very old. The second assumption is that people in individualistic societies are most lonely. Contrary to this belief, findings show that older adults in northern European countries tend to be less lonely than those in the more familialistic southern European countries. The scarce data on Central and Eastern Europe suggest a high prevalence of older adult loneliness in those countries. The third assumption that loneliness has increased over the past decades finds no support. Loneliness levels have decreased, albeit slightly. The review notes the persistence of ageist attitudes, and underscores the importance of considering people’s frame of reference and normative orientation in analyses of loneliness

Demand of Long-Term Care and benefit eligibility across European countries

In the context of an unprecedented aging process, the role of domiciliary care for older adults is becoming increasingly essential. In order to design effective and proactive policies of formal elderly-care, it is crucial to understand how vulnerable elderly individuals would adjust their informal long-term care utilization to changes in the formal-care provision. Although theoretical frameworks have been proposed, showing that a positive relationship could arise when the elderly exhibit an excess demand of care, empirical evidence is scant, due to the lack of credible instruments to account for the endogenous nature of formal-care decisions. We propose a novel instrument, an index that capture individuals’ eligibility status to the LTC domiciliary programmes implemented in their own nation or region. That is, a dummy variable - being eligible or not - which is grounded on the LTC regulation context at national or regional level, but still has individual within region variation due to differences in health conditions and vulnerability assessment. We estimate an IV two-part model using a representative sample of the over 60 population for non-institutionalised individuals in Austria, Germany, France and Belgium. Our results, which are robust to a number of different specifications, point at the lack of crowding-out of the informalby the formal-care, thus suggesting the existence of a substantial unmet demand of LTC among the elderly

Policies for later-life families in a comparative European perspective

The original version of this chapter was published with incorrect information in Table 14.1, which has been updated now

The Prospects of the Baby Boomers: Methodological Challenges in Projecting the Lives of an Aging Cohort

In most industrialized countries, the work and family patterns of the baby boomers characterized by more heterogeneous working careers and less stable family lives set them apart from preceding cohorts. Thus, it is of crucial importance to understand how these different work and family lives are linked to the boomers' prospective material well-being as they retire. This paper presents a new and unique matching-based approach for the projection of the life courses of German baby boomers, called the LAW-Life Projection Model. Basis for the projection are data from 27 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel linked with administrative pension records from the German Statutory Pension In-surance that cover lifecycle pension-relevant earnings. Unlike model-based micro simula-tions that age the data year by year our matching-based projection uses sequences from older birth cohorts to complete the life-courses of statistically similar baby boomers through to retirement. An advantage of this approach is to coherently project the work-life and family trajectories as well as lifecycle earnings. The authors present a benchmark anal-ysis to assess the validity and accuracy of the projection. For this purpose, they cut a signif-icant portion of already lived lives and test different combinations of matching algorithms and donor pool specifications to identify the combination that produces the best fit be-tween previously cut but observed and projected life-course information. Exploiting the advantages of the projected data, the authors compare the returns to education - measured in terms of pension entitlements - across cohorts. The results indicate that within cohorts, differences between individuals with low and high educational attainment increase over time for men and women in East and West Germany. East German boomer women with low educational attainment face the most substantial losses in pension entitlements that put them at a high risk of being poor as they retire