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Title: Caring for Parents: Stratified Effects on Adult Children’s Labor Force Participation
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2020
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Abstract: Adult children play a critical role caring for parents across the later life course. Converging demographic trends—longer life expectancies and smaller generations of young people—are likely to intensify caregiving demands on adult children. While there is evidence of a small negative effect of caregiving on labor force participation, we know relatively little about how this relationship varies by socioeconomic status (SES) or race. Because SES-related and racial disparities in morbidity and mortality are most pronounced in middle ages, research on stratified effects of caregiving on the labor force should include the adult children of relatively younger parents. Recent research has been primarily limited to adult children over age 51 (i.e., Health and Retirement Study) or parents over age 65 (i.e., National Health and Aging Trends Survey). This dissertation, comprised of three papers, contributes to the existing literature by including relatively young adult children, with a particular focus on differences by, respectively: socioeconomic status, gender, and race. In the first paper, I examine the relationship between caregiving and labor force participation with a cross-sectional module of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), using an instrumental variable analysis to predict caregiving (by exploiting variation in parent health and distance to parent) and model its effect on labor supply. In the second and third papers, I use longitudinal, intergenerational data from the PSID to estimate the relationship over time between parental disability and adult children’s labor force trajectories via a hierarchical linear model (HLM) for change. I find evidence of active labor force participation among adult children who are caring for parents—though women and men have poorer earnings trajectories over time if they have a parent with a disability. I find distinct patterns by SES and by race, with lower rates of employment and lower earnings for low-SES women and Black women with parents with disabilities. These findings confirm the importance of including younger adult children in caregiving research, and point toward differential experiences with caregiving as a contributor to income and racial inequality.
Url: https://www.proquest.com/docview/2436418811?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true
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Authors: Waring, Melody K
Institution: University of Wisconsin- Madison
Department: Social Welfare
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Family and Marriage, Health, Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Race and Ethnicity
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