Research
Publications
"Elderly Care Across Europe: The Role of Formal and Informal Care in Family Decision-Making"
July 2026. Accepted at the Review of Economics of the Household.
Abstract: This paper studies how families make joint decisions about elderly care and labor supply, emphasizing the role of interactions between care recipients and their adult children. I develop a model in which an elderly parent and multiple children make simultaneous decisions about formal care use, informal caregiving, and labor force participation within a static, non-cooperative game of complete information. I estimate the model separately for Northern, Central, and Southern Europe using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to account for cross-regional differences in institutions, labor markets, and preferences. I use the estimated model to evaluate five policy experiments aimed at expanding care provision and mitigating the labor market consequences of informal caregiving. The results show that subsidies targeted at formal care recipients substantially increase overall care coverage but have limited effects on informal caregivers' labor supply, particularly in Southern Europe. By contrast, subsidies targeted at informal caregivers generate larger informal-care and labor supply responses and can reduce employment gaps between caregivers and non-caregivers. These effects depend crucially on family structure, with larger families exhibiting stronger caregiving responses.
Working papers
"Your Job or Your Folks? Working and Caring for Elderly Parents in Europe"
Abstract: This paper studies the effect of the provision of informal care to parents on labor supply decisions, focusing on the intensive margin. For this purpose, I build a static, structural model featuring an agent who is altruistic towards their parent and allocates their time and budget to consumption, hours worked, and hours of formal and informal care to maximize utility. I estimate this model using data of Northern, Central and Southern European countries from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe. The estimated model provides valuable insights into the mechanisms driving time allocation decisions. In particular, I concentrate on the role played by wages, prices of formal care, and family ties. Then, I use the model to simulate the reactions of agents to unconditional cash benefits and discounts on formal care prices. These simulations show that cash benefits induce agents to substitute hours worked for hours of informal care, while formal care price discounts give place to replacing hours of informal care for hours of formal care.