Midlife Caregiving & Employment: An Analysis of Adjustments in Work Hours and Informal Care for Female Employees in Europe. ENEPRI Working Paper No. 9, February 2002

This study examines eldercare in private households and the employment behaviour of female caregivers in Europe. Based on the first three waves of the European Community Household Panel we estimate probit-models to analyse the probability of caregiving and we use a simplified difference-in-difference approach to explain the correlation between changes in caregiving behaviour and changes in working hours. We restrict our sample to middle-aged women in 12 EU-countries. In order to control for country-effects we include country dummies in our models. In addition, we run separate estimations for northern European countries on the one hand and southern European countries on the other hand. We find a significant negative association between starting or increasing informal caregiving and the change in weekly work hours. No such association emerges for women terminating a caregiving spell or reducing care hours