Unequal care provision: evidence from the Share-Corona Survey

This paper brings new evidence on the differences in informal care provision across individuals, supporting the hypothesis that women and the “young old” people are more likely to be caregivers. We exploit exogenous changes in the demand for care following the COVID-19 outbreak and make use of variations in lockdown policies across Europe. We use the SHARE Corona survey, which involves about 50000 respondents of age 50 and over in 28 countries and has detailed information on the provision of care, characteristics of the caregiver and of the care recipient. We link the SHARE Corona Survey data with an individual specific “stringency index”, which measures the intensity of the lockdown policies and the degree of individual’s exposure to these restrictions. We propose a new methodology to measure the degree of rationing of care that older people experienced during the pandemic (and after) and find that women and people in the age group 50-65 were indeed more likely to provide help/care, and also document the multi-facet interaction with the labour market status of caregivers.