Labor market outcomes of informal care provision in Japan

Abstract

This paper examines the labor supply outcomes of family care provision for Japanese households in 2010, ten years after the introduction of the public long-term care insurance (LTCI) program. We found that family care provision for parents adversely affected labor market outcomes of main caregivers at home in terms of the probability of working, employment status and hours worked. The adverse effect was found to be more serious for female caregivers than for male caregivers. Moreover, our results suggest that the public LTCI program seems to only partially mitigate the disadvantages of the main caregivers for both males and females.