Revisiting longer-term health effects of informal caregiving: evidence from the UK

Summary

We estimate the longer-term and dynamic effects of providing informal care on caregivers’ health in the United Kingdom. Using propensity score matching to address the endogeneity of informal care provision, we estimate static and sequential matching models exploring health effects at the extensive and intensive margin of informal caregiving and their persistence for up to five years. Our results suggest substantial negative health effects confined to the mental domain and asymmetrically experienced by caregivers providing more than 20 hours of weekly care. Further, our dynamic sequential matching results indicate that for caregivers providing multiple years of higher intensity care the negative effects persist.