The Impact of Informal Care on Household Labor Supply and Health Dynamics: Evidence from linked Austrian Administrative Data (INFCARE)

Demographic shifts due to population ageing will result in increasing public long-term care expenditures in Austria. The current long-term care system places a strong emphasis on informal home-based care as opposed to formal home-based care or institutional care. Approximately 2.2 percent of Austrians provide informal care, averaging 18 hours per week, with strong gender disparities. This project aims at creating an innovative dataset on households with long-term care needs by utilising novel data sources. Specifically, it combines data on all individuals receiving long-term care support and their detailed healthcare use with data on labour supply from the Austrian Micro Data Center. The dataset will enable empirical estimations of the impact of informal caregiving on household labour supply and healthcare utilisation, with a focus on co-resident caregivers. Moreover, by covering all household members in the data it is possible to examine spillover effects on intra-household labour supply and healthcare use. The objective of this research is to provide quantitative insights into the challenges faced by informal caregivers and the effectiveness of the long-term care system to buffer them. Our research aims to provide valuable insights into the economic trade-offs involved in the prioritisation of informal care. By doing so, we aim to offer policymakers valuable guidance to inform the further development of the care system. This is particularly important, as existing research for Austria is hard to find due to data limitations.