Abstract
This paper investigates how the presence of a disabled person in the household affects the employment probabilities of cohabiting women. Using a unique data source and a dynamic probit model accounting for unobserved heterogeneity and endogenous initial conditions, we analyze Italy, France, and the UK, three countries that diverge substantially in terms of welfare system regimes, family and employment policies, and social norms. In line with care theory suggestions, we find that in Italy, where formal caring services are limited, and the male breadwinner model persists, women see reduced employment possibilities when cohabiting with disabled persons. In France and the UK, where family and employment policies, such as low-cost formal care and part-time jobs, provide some support for women in reconciling unpaid and paid work, the presence of a disabled person increases employment probabilities. In disentangling the contributions of disability benefits, it appears that they might provide financial resources to support formal caregiving and, therefore, mitigate the caregiving responsibilities of women.
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Berger and Fleisher (1984) show that the labor supply response of the wife to the deterioration of her husband’s health depends on the attractiveness of transfers for which the family may qualify when the husband’s health deteriorates.
Differences in welfare systems for disabled persons were reflected in public expenditure statistics (Eurostat 2015). The UK spent 531 euros per inhabitant (expressed in purchasing power standard) for long-term care, while France spent 375 and Italy 248. Expenditures on sickness and disability were 2.5% of GDP in the UK, 2.8% in France, and 1.8% in Italy.
EU-SILC provided 4 years of length in the panels and we analyzed the 2007–2010 panel. The investigated period has been characterized by different business cycle patterns in the analyzed countries. In 2008 the GDP growth was slightly negative in Italy and UK, whereas it was slightly positive in France. However, all those countries were characterized by a GDP drop in 2009, while in 2010 the GDP growth returned positive.
We explicitly tested for self-reporting bias in cross-disability and for endogeneity of household members’ disability status (following Contoyannis et al. 2004); both hypotheses were rejected. For the sake of brevity, we did not report these results, but they were available upon request.
Cases with multiple household members with disabilities represented just 2–3% of our sample. In those cases, the dummy variable referred to the individual with the most severe disability.
Figures were computed on our sample units of females aged [25, 64] in the period 2007–2010. Given that labor market information in EU-SILC data were self-perceived, these numbers did not coincide to the official employment rates. The (average 2007–2010 period) official employment rates gathered by Eurostat (http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=lfsa_ergan&lang=en) were 51.6% for Italy, 67.1% for France, and 68.9% for the UK.
We did not restrict our analysis to the observations where a partner was present (two-person households) since we also controlled for the direct impact of disability. The use of a dummy for single individuals helped to isolate the impact of being single (one-person household) on employment prospects.
We used consumer price indices specific to the countries analyzed.
We calculated the percentage of the sample receiving disability benefits by severity of disability. In all countries, there was a positive association between the percentage receiving disability benefits and the severity of disability. For disability (some limitations in daily activities), the percentages were 10.4% in Italy, 9.6% in France, and 12.8% in the UK. For severe disability (severe limitations in daily activities), those figures increased to 43.1% in Italy, 25.3% in France, and 41.2% in the UK.
Technically, this required the introduction of a lagged employment indicator on the right-hand side of the employment equation (e.g., Wooldridge 2010).
The initial conditions problem arose when the observed start of the stochastic process did not coincide with the true start of the process. Consequently, the dependent variable at the first period generally could not be an exogenous variable that gave rise to the process.
For the benchmark and the supplementary analyses, we did not report the estimates of the equations for the initial conditions for the sake of brevity. These results were available upon request. It was worth noting that the non-exogeneity of the initial conditions, which corresponded to the null hypothesis that the coefficient of Eq. (5) equaled zero, was rejected for all countries and in both models, supporting the choice of the Heckman estimator.
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Mussida, C., Sciulli, D. Does the Presence of a Disabled Person in the Household Affect the Employment Probabilities of Cohabiting Women? Evidence from Italy, France and the UK. J Fam Econ Iss 40, 338–351 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-019-09612-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-019-09612-8