Walsh Edel, Murphy Aileen
Department of Economics, Cork University Business School, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland.
BMC Res Notes. 2018 Aug 10;11(1):570. doi: 10.1186/s13104-018-3684-z.
Examining the causal relationship between employment and informal caring to date has been impeded in countries like Ireland where there is a lack of suitable panel data and/or variables for instrument construction. This paper employs propensity score matching to control for non-random selection into treatment and control groups which controls for differences in employment outcomes between carers and non-carers in Ireland using data from Quarterly National Household Survey 2009 Quarter 3. Earlier papers focus on using regression techniques which may lead to biased estimates.
Results suggest that differences exist between carers and non-carers with respect to their employment status in Ireland. Overall the results suggest that the effects are more significant for those providing greater hours of informal care per week than those providing fewer hours of care per week. The effects estimated in this paper are likely to be more precise as failing to account for potential biases in the relationship are likely to underestimate the true effect of caring on employment outcomes. We find that propensity score matching provides an alternative method of examining the relationship when suitable panel data and/or variables for instrument construction are not available.
在爱尔兰这样缺乏合适的面板数据和/或用于工具构建的变量的国家，迄今为止，对就业与非正式照料之间因果关系的研究受到了阻碍。本文采用倾向得分匹配法来控制治疗组和对照组的非随机选择，利用2009年第三季度国民家庭季度调查的数据，控制爱尔兰照料者和非照料者在就业结果上的差异。早期的论文侧重于使用回归技术，这可能会导致估计有偏差。
结果表明，在爱尔兰，照料者和非照料者在就业状况方面存在差异。总体而言，结果表明，对于每周提供更多小时非正式照料的人来说，其影响比每周提供较少小时照料的人更为显著。本文估计的影响可能更精确，因为未能考虑到这种关系中潜在的偏差可能会低估照料对就业结果的真实影响。我们发现，当没有合适的面板数据和/或用于工具构建的变量时，倾向得分匹配提供了一种检验这种关系的替代方法。
