Content area
Abstract
This thesis consists of three papers on health and aging in Canada. The first essay is concerned with the opportunity costs of providing informal care to the elderly people. Using the General Social Survey (1996) data this essay examines the impact of informal care on the caregiver's labour market behaviour. This is achieved by estimating the impact of informal care on the caregiver's employment and work hours. The empirical results from estimating employment model suggest that caregiving has no impact on caregiver's employment probability. Caregiving has also no significant impact on the work hours of male caregivers. However, caregiving has significant negative impact on the work hours of female caregivers. The paper also discusses the policy implication of the results.
The second essay uses health production function framework to estimate the impact of formal home care and informal care on the health of elderly people in Canada. The study uses National Population Health Survey (NPHS)-1996–1997 data and adopts ordered probit approach in the estimation process. Formal home care is found to have a positive and statistically significant impact on the health of elderly people. The results also show that informal care improves the health of elderly except in the case of 80+ male groups.
The third essay uses NPHS-1998 data and examines the impact of chronic diseases such as Arthritis, High Blood Pressure, Diabetes, Heart Disease and Cancer on the labour market behaviour of individuals over life cycle. The study uses probit method to estimate labor force participation equation, ordered probit method to estimate the impact on illness on the probability of having full time, part time and no employment and Heckman's sample selection model to estimate the earnings function. The paper finds that Arthritis, Heart Disease and High Blood pressure are the common diseases that have significant negative impacts on the labor market behavior and earnings of both male and female individuals.
