Effects of Care on Working, Income, and Leisure

Abstract

In Japan, the rapid aging of the population has lead to an increase in people needing long-term care. This has increased the number of working-age people who care for their parents or parents-in-law and their number is expected to increase with the continued aging of the population. When family members require care, working-age caregivers may have to leave their jobs or reduce their working hours. Previous research in Japan in this area assumed that care was exogenously determined. However, the decisions to work and to provide care might be simultaneously determined and treating the care burden as an exogenous variable might cause bias in the estimates. Moreover, the effects of care on work might differ according to the type of care, such as physical care or housework support. However, this was not considered in the previous studies in Japan. Hence, this study used an instrumental variable method to consider the care burden's endogeneity. Also, for our estimates, we used not only the average number of care hours per week as a care burden indicator, but also hours spent on physical care and housework support. The data used was "Survey on the At-home Care Costs and Caregivers." The respondents live with their parents or parents-in-law aged 65 and over. Our estimates showed that providing care decreased the probability of working, working hours, and income, and for men and women the effects were larger for physical care and housework support than for total-care hours. This is thought to show that the physical and mental burdens imposed by physical care and housework support are greater than those of other types of care. Care had a larger effect on work for women than for men, but it had a larger effect on leisure hours for men than for women. This is considered to be because as men are often the main bread winner, even if their care hours increase, they do not decrease their working hours, but instead decrease their leisure hours. In the case of men, the effects of physical care on the probability of working, working hours, and income were greater than the effects of housework support. On the contrary, in the case of women, the effects of housework support on these variables were larger than the effects of physical care. Except for the analyses of leisure and women's income, care burden was an exogenous variable.