Moving towards Older Parents and Short-Term Labour Market Outcomes: The Role of Parental Health

Alena Artamonova , Väestöliitto, Population Research Institute

Proximity to parents can be important to adult children's labour market outcomes in terms of juggling work and childcare responsibilities, but can also be a burden if parents need care. Adult children who live far from their parents might move closer to them to facilitate the exchange of intergenerational support. When children, particularly daughters, have to take care of older parents, the time commitment of caregiving often competes against time spent on the labour force. Based on these insights from previous research, I hypothesise that for adult children, moving closer to older parents will be associated with experiencing labour market deterioration (i.e., the transition to unemployment or decreasing income). Additionally, among adult children who move closer to older parents, those who have healthy parents might have better labour market outcomes than those with unhealthy parents. The deteriorating effect of moving toward an older parent in need of health-related care on labour market participation might be stronger for daughters than sons. To test these hypotheses, I propose to use data from administrative registers of Norway about men and women at working-age in 2015-2016 who have older parents. It is important to consider that migration (as well as moving toward a parent who needs care) and labour market outcomes may be endogenous. Therefore, to test the hypotheses, two approaches will be applied. The first one is to employ models with multinomial treatment using maximum simulated likelihood. The ‘naïve’ approach is to employ OLS and logit models of adult child’s labour market outcomes.

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 Presented in Session 7. Intergenerational relations and inequality