Family elderly care, home-based elderly care policies, and labour supply of adult married children in China

Gao, Aohan 2024. Family elderly care, home-based elderly care policies, and labour supply of adult married children in China. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This thesis explores the impact of elderly care provision on the labour supply of married adult children using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) for the years 2004, 2006, 2009, 2011, and 2015. It also examines the causal impact of China's home-based elderly care policy—gradually implemented across provinces since 2008—on the labour supply of married adult children. Using the Two-Stage Least Squares (2SLS) method, it finds that for working-aged married women, elderly care responsibility significantly increases the employment probability (6.8 percentage points). However, conditional on employment, it significantly reduces weekly paid working hours (4.96 hours). Further heterogeneity analysis indicates that the financial compensation mechanism is more pronounced among older, non-coresident and non-childcare responsibility female caregivers. For working-aged married men, the 2SLS analysis reveals that elderly care responsibilities reduce the husbands’ employment probability by 5.3 percentage points, while there is no significant impact on their paid working hours. The potential mechanisms analysis suggest that the impact of elderly care is likely driven by husband's sharing of family care responsibilities. Furthermore, the impact varies by factors such as job type (part-time/full-time), living arrangements, and care recipient. The third empirical question of this thesis explores the causal impact of China home-based elderly care policy on the labour supply of married adult children at both extensive and intensive margins. By exploiting the variation in the timing of implementation across provinces and employing various methods, including static and dynamic two-way fixed effects and staggered difference-in-differences methods (as proposed by Sun and Abraham, 2021), the analysis reveals a robust negative impact on the employment probability of married women (5.4-8.6 percentage points). This effect is concentrated in subgroups with lower education, higher household income, and older age, while no significant effects are found for men or on the intensive margin for women.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Business (Including Economics)
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	16 May 2025
Last Modified:	16 May 2025 14:52
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/178332

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