European Network of Economic Policy Research Institutes

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. * C. Katharina Spiess is a researcher at the DIW Berlin and Technical University Berlin. Ulrike Schneider is in the Department of Economics, University of Hannover. This research was carried out as part of the work of the European Panel Analysis Group (EPAG) on the project “The Dynamics of Social Change in Europe” (CT-1999-00032) under the Training and Mobility of Researchers Programme of the European Communities’ Fifth Framework Program. This research was also supported by funds from the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation (TransCoop Program 97-I-25). The authors wish to thank Markus Pannenberg, Joerg-Peter Schraepler, Douglas Wolf, participants of the ENEPRI Workshop on ”Ageing Populations in the EU”, February 2001, Berlin. We are also grateful to an anonymous referee for constructive comments. All remaining errors and deficiencies are our own.