Jacobs, Josephine C.

Population ageing is putting pressure on pension systems and health care services, creating an imperative to extend working lives. At the same time, policy makers throughout Europe and North America are trying to expand the use of home care over institutional services. Thus, the number of people combining caregiving responsibilities with paid work is growing. We investigate the conflicts that arise from this by exploring the time costs of unpaid care and how caregiving time is traded off against time in paid work and leisure in three distinct policy contexts.

Background: Growing evidence has documented economic spillover effects experienced by intensive caregivers across the lifecycle. These spillover effects are rarely incorporated in economic analyses of health interventions. When these costs are captured, it is shown that commonly applied methods for valuing caregiver time may be underestimating the true opportunity costs of informal care.