Principal Investigator: Douglas Wolf
Active Dates: 2012 – 2012
Funding Source: Russell Sage Foundation
Description:
If we are to understand the effects on care providers of doing unpaid care work, then we need to understand the factors associated with the decision of whether and how much unpaid (or “family”) care work to do. This, in turn, will help us determine whether care providers differ from non-providers in ways other than their caring activity. Factors associated with the decision to provide family care fall into several categories
- Measured individual- and family-level characteristics that indicate demands for, and supply of, care (e.g., value of time, competing claims on time, alternative sources of care, capacities for and limitations on ability to provide care);
- Motivations and emotional attachments; psychological and personality traits;
- Genetic predispositions;
- Environmental factors, including the policy environment.
This project focuses on the fourth set of factors. Relevant policy dimensions include:
- Policies that constrain the supply of formal long-term care services (e.g., moratoria, or Certificate of Need requirements, for new service providers; Medicaid reimbursement rates; staffing and credentialing requirements for service providers);
- Policies that influence the demand for formal long-term care services (e.g., Medicaid income and asset eligibility rules; states’ adoption of the Medicaid personal care option; use of waivered Home and Community Based Services);
- Policies with “direct” effects on the incentives to be a family caregiver (Medicaid estate recovery efforts; family leave policy; possibility of using Medicaid benefit to pay family caregivers).
The empirical strategy to be used consists of merging individual-level panel data (Health and Retirement Survey) to variables measuring aspects of state-level policy environment. The HRS includes measures of parents’ need for care along with numerous individual- and family-level correlates of caregiver behavior. For recent years, it is possible to obtain a restricted-access version of HRS data that includes indicator of respondents’ AND respondents’ parents’ state of residence.