Caregiving and Work: The Relationship between Labor Market Attachment and Parental Caregiving Discussion of Fahle and McGarry By Maria Fitzpatrick Cornell University and NBER November 3, 2017 2017 SIEPR Conference on Working Longer and Retirement

My takeaways Most parental caregivers are women. 46 percent of women age 52 or older with living parents or parents-in-law are going to provide care at some point before they are 72. That means a lot of women are at risk of caregiving, so really important to know the effects. Once we control for other characteristics, caregivers are NOT those less attached to the labor force. Caregivers tend to work less. Maybe they were less attached to the labor force in the first place. If anything, after controlling for other things that put women”at-risk” of caregiving, there is a positive relationship between measures of labor market attachment and caregiving. Caregiving may have negative effects on labor market outcomes.

Some quick suggestions with the data The authors do a lot to overcome the selection problem. The concern is that women with low labor market attachment prior to caregiving are selecting into caregiving making it look like caregiving has a negative effect on labor supply. Authors use lifetime labor supply and individual fixed effects to overcome selection bias. Identification is off of shocks to labor supply that are correlated in time with parental caregiving. What if there are negative effects on children of parents entering the state of needing caregiving, regardless of whether the child is a caregiver? Could you control for the timing of the types of negative health shocks for parents that lead to caregiving by anyone (not just the relevant child in the data) to separately identify effects of caregiving from the effects of negative parental health shocks?

Some quick suggestions with the data Limited info on nature of caregiving makes it tricky to to say more about caregiving than the authors do here. Might want to separate the intensive caregivers from the “weekend warriors”. Could you use hours to look at effects separately for those who almost have to be intensive caregivers? Top decile of hours? At least X hours over the two year period? Might want to know more about the pattern of decrease in labor supply. Is this quick and total exit or is it gradual as the caregiving takes its toll? Could you use the self-reported information on jobs between waves or the Social Security data on quarterly earnings to say more about the nature of the decline in labor supply?

Expanding the picture What are the broader effects of caregiving? The focus here is on labor supply and earnings, but, at these ages, that’s only part of the picture. What are the effects of caregiving on other components of financial well-being? The negative effect seen here is going to be even larger for the caregivers if they are also giving up pension or Social Security income when they step out of the labor market. Could see this in the HRS. Where have all the men gone? Does caregiving have the same impacts on men’s labor supply? Could tell us something about nature of the problem. Reminds me a lot of the issues surrounding disparate effects of child rearing on parental labor supply across genders. Would be interesting to see if comparisons across genders are the same here. Could use the various combinations of child-parent and child-parent-in-law combinations of care given at the household level and see if anything interesting falls out.

How do we think about this for the broader population? This is a key sample of women to use for identifying the effect. It is a selected sample. Sample includes those not already caregiving, but parent still alive. What does this mean about age of parent at birth of the child and health of parent? Sample includes those age 52+ in 1992 (cohorts born before 1940). What can we learn from these cohorts about the women who are entering into their 50s now? (Lifetime labor supply, timing of birth, parental health different) Broader question: Should we think negative effects for this for group are representative of the effects on labor supply for all caregivers? Most interesting to think about caregivers earlier in their careers. Effect could be bigger if the negative effects compound over remainder of careers. Effect could be smaller if there’s more time to rebound. Effects could be smaller if there’s less elasticity in jobs earlier in career.