Long-Term Care Responsibility and its Opportunity Costs

This paper analyzes the relationship between long-term care provision and the average individual wage rate. In addition, the effects of the number of hours spent on caregiving on the probability of employment as well as on the number of hours worked are examined. Data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement (SHARE) of 2004 and 2006 is used to analyze caregiving effects on the European labor market. Descriptive statistics show a positive correlation between hours of care and the wage rate for those working. In the regression analysis, sample-selection models combined with instrumental-variable estimation are used to estimate the causal effects of hours of care on wages. The results illustrate that care for parents has a large negative impact on the individual's wage rate. Test results show that controlling for sample selection is reasonable. Finally, the probability of employment is only decreased in the female sample. Although the hours worked are not significantly affected.Dieses Papier analysiert die Beziehung zwischen Langzeitpflege und dem durchschnittlichen individuellen Lohnsatz potenzieller Pflegepersonen. Außerdem wird der Effekt von pflegestunden auf die Wahrscheinlichkeit, Arbeit anzubieten, sowie auf die Anzahl der Arbeitsstunden untersucht. Daten des Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement (SHARE) aus den Jahren 2004 und 2006 werden genutzt, um Effekte auf dem europäischen Arbeitsmarkt zu analysieren. Deskriptive Statistiken zeigen eine positive Korrelation zwischen Pflegestunden und Lohnsatz für arbeitende Pflegepersonen. In der Regressionsanalyse werden Selektionsmodelle mit Instrumentenvariablenmethoden kombiniert, um kausale Effekte dazu zu erhalten. Die Ergebnisse veranschaulichen, dass die Pflege von Eltern einen stark signifikant negativen Effekt auf den individuellen Lohnsatz hat. Testergebnisse zeigen, dass es notwendig ist, für Stichprobenselektion zu kontrollieren. Die Wahrscheinlichkeit, Arbeit anzubieten, wird nur in einer Stichprobe aus Frauen gesenkt. Die Arbeitsstunden werden nicht signifikant beeinflusst

What Makes Russian Women (Un)Happy? A Closer Look at the Family

Two decades of economic transition revealed that Russian women are on average less happy than men. This paper addresses individual subjective well-being from the intra-family perspective and investigates whether the gender satisfaction gap could be caused, among all, by a mismatch between the socially imposed patriarchal family gender roles and the actually performed ones. I test for the presence of the following phenomena: (1) a fair share of income brought by each of the spouses into their household is judged according to the patriarchal model attributing the role of the breadwinner to men; (2) division of housework, with women, even if working, holding the main responsibility for housekeeping activities, is perceived as fair. Prime-age working adults living in partnership constitute the dataset which is a part of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey for 1994-2004. Life satisfaction is modelled with the help of the seemingly unrelated bivariate ordered probit model aiming at the adjustment for unobserved factors influencing happiness evaluation of both partners. For the period 1994-1998, the results show that women's relative unhappiness is likely to be causes by their increasing earning powers with relative to men, and overload with hours spent on housekeeping in households with children. In the second period of economic growth, 2000 - 2004, I observe a change in women's preferences over time-use and total income shares, suggesting a tendency towards their emancipation

Migrants’ International Transfers and Educational Expenditure: Empirical Evidence from Albania

The present paper analyses the expenditure behavior of Albanian families. The objective is to cast some light upon the relationship between education expenditure and the volume of remittances, sent from abroad by household members. To assess the existence of an education enhancing effect of remittances, an Engel curve framework is employed, where heterogeneity in interests or in bargaining power among the members within the households is assumed. The empirical estimation accounts for the censored nature of the education expenditure through using Heckman two-step as well as a semiparametric model for sample selection. Finally, quintile regression analysis is employed to investigate whether migrants' remittances have a differentiated effect on various quantiles of the conditional distribution of the education consumption