A new working paper has been added to the CINCH working paper series: “Utilisation of personal care services in Scotland: the influence of unpaid carers” by Elizabeth Lemmon.
Unpaid carers may have an influence on the formal care utilisation of the cared for. Whether this influence is positive or negative will have important implications for the costs of formal care provision. The relationship between unpaid and formal care is of particular importance in Scotland, where personal care is provided for free by Local Authorities, to individuals aged 65+. The existing evidence on the impact of unpaid care on formal care utilisation is extremely mixed, and there is currently no evidence for Scotland. This paper is the first to investigate how the presence of an unpaid carer influences personal care use by those aged 65+ in Scotland, using a unique administrative dataset not previously used in research. Specifically, it uses the Scottish Social Care Survey (SCS) from 2015 and 2016 and compares Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), Generalised Linear Models (GLM), and Two-Part Models (2PM). The results suggest that unpaid care complements personal care services and this finding is robust to a number of sensitivity analyses. This finding may imply that incentivising unpaid care could increase formal care costs, and at the same time it points to the potential for unmet need of those who do not have an unpaid carer. Due to the limitations of the data, future research is necessary.
A new working paper has been added to the CINCH working paper series: “The Educational and Fertility Effects of Sibling Deaths” by Dhanushka Thamarapani, Marc Rockmore, and Willa Friedman.
An emerging literature finds that childhood exposure to adverse events determines adult outcomes and behavior. We extend this research to understand the influence of witnessing a sibling death as a child on subsequent educational and fertility outcomes in Indonesia. Using panel data and a sibling fixed effects model, we identify this relationship based on variation in the age of surviving children within the same family. Our findings strongly support the importance and persistence of adverse childhood experiences. In particular, for surviving sisters, witnessing a sibling death reduces the years of completed education and the likelihood of completing secondary schooling. The effect on surviving brothers is more muted. A potential channel for this result is that women respond by changing their fertility behavior. While surviving the death of a sibling has little effect on desired fertility levels, we find evidence that surviving sisters start a family about 3-4 years earlier. This suggests that interventions targeted at early-life outcomes may have important ripple effects and that the full impact of health interventions may not be visible until decades afterwards.
On Monday, July 16 2018, 14:00 - 15:30, Irene Mussio (University of Massachusetts Amherst) will present:
An (un)healthy social dilemma: using normative messaging to increase flu vaccinations
Research suggests that normative messaging can be used to increase voluntary provision of public goods. We extend the literature by examining the impact of normative messaging on a joint product: a flu vaccine. We conduct a field experiment in conjunction with University Health Services, targeting undergraduate students living on campus. The wording on the posters is varied to emphasize either the individual benefits of the vaccine, the social benefits of the vaccine or both benefits together. We find that highlighting both the individual and social benefits of vaccination has the strongest impact on vaccination turnout. Overall, the result is driven predominantly by females. This is consistent with previous literature suggesting that women are more sensitive to social cues and have stronger emotional reactions to risky situations as well as higher rates of health care usage.
Room: WST-C.02.12, Weststadttürme Berliner Platz 6-8, Essen
