Noa De La Vega’s research focuses on gender and inequality. She describes her work as “care economics”, exploring the balance between paid work and unpaid caregiving responsibilities for family members. In an interview, De La Vega shared insights into her latest paper 'The Aging Parent Penalty Across Countries’.
As the co-author of a working paper that unveils how health shocks experienced by elderly parents impact the employment of their adult children, could you please tell us what led you to explore this topic?
I carried out the research that led to the working paper ‘The Aging Parent Penalty Across Countries’ with EUI alumna Stav Federman, who is now a post-doctoral researcher at Ben Gurion University. Together, Stav and I have examined the so-called ‘aging parent penalty’, meaning the labour market costs that adult children face when they care for an aging or ill parent.
Many academic studies have shown how childcare affects the careers of mothers and fathers differently. I refer to the so-called ‘child penalty,’ which was also the focus of one of my previous works. In fact, in my paper ‘The differential effect of childbirth on men's and women's careers’, I discuss that while women often reduce their paid employment after childbirth, men frequently increase theirs to meet the rising financial demands of the family. However, academia has paid much less attention to how other forms of care, like elderly care, impact family members' employment. Stav and I aimed to fill this gap, investigating whether an ‘aging parent penalty’ exists alongside the ‘child penalty’.
Our research analyses how elderly caregiving tasks vary by country and system, and the resulting impact on adult children's employment. Unlike childcare, where parental responsibility is clear to some extent, elderly care often raises questions about who should bear the burden.
Now that you have explained the ‘why’ of your research, can you clarify where and how you carried out the work?
In our work, we used data from SHARE, which is a survey on health, aging, and retirement in Europe, to examine the impact of parental health shocks on their adult children’s employment in six European countries - Denmark, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. Parents belonging to our sample were 71.6 years old on average, while their adult children ranged from 41 to 43 years old.
Our methodology focused on ‘health shocks’, meaning a parent's first-time diagnosis of a new and severe health condition. We specifically considered as health shocks: stroke, heart attack, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and chronic lung disease, focusing on the initial diagnosis in cases of multiple illness. We then examined how the parents’ health shocks impacted the employment of their adult children, with a particular focus on the gender employment gap between sons and daughters.
How do parental health shocks affect adult children's employment? Does gender play a role?
Across all six countries of our study, we found that a parental health shock immediately widens the gender gap in employment between brothers and sisters by 8.6%. Daughters experience a notable drop in employment after their parents suffer a health shock.
However, a deeper analysis into each of the six countries reveals a more nuanced picture, largely dependent on national caregiving systems. Our study categorises Western European countries into three distinct models based on how care responsibility for the elderly is divided between family, market, or government.
In ‘family-based care countries’ like Italy and Spain, where parents rely on informal care from family members, daughters frequently assume caregiving roles when parents fall ill. This translates directly into their professional lives: daughters' employment declined by 8.5% following a parental health shock, while we observed no significant effect on sons' employment. This finding strongly suggests that, in Italy and Spain, daughters reallocated their time from paid work to caregiving tasks. However, geographical proximity plays a major role: this result concerns daughters living within 100 kilometres of their parents, with those living further away remaining unaffected.
In ‘market-based care countries’, such as Germany and Switzerland, caregiving duties are normally outsourced to paid professionals. In these countries, parental health shocks lead to increased expenditure on professional caregivers. Our research found a 4.9% increase in sons' employment in those cases. This could indicate that sons work more to financially support their sick parents or to compensate for the lack of a financial support previously provided by their parents. Daughters' employment in these countries remained unaffected.
Finally, in ‘government-based care countries’ like Sweden and Denmark, elderly care is mostly provided by the government. Following a parental health shock, there is an increased reliance on professional paid help, but no significant changes in healthcare expenditure for the parents thanks to the governmental welfare systems. Our research found no significant change in employment for either daughters or sons. This suggests that, in times of illness, elderly parents in these countries primarily depend on state-provided welfare, alleviating the need for their children to provide direct care or finance it.
Beyond your findings, how does your research contribute to our understanding of the challenges facing aging societies and gender equality?
To the best of our knowledge, our research is the first to examine the causal effect of a parental health shock on the gender gap in employment among adult children. This enriches the broader discussion on the gendered implications of caregiving and financial responsibilities within Europe's increasingly elderly population.
Our findings demonstrate that sons and daughters assume distinct roles in supporting their aging parents, and that these roles exacerbate the gender employment gap.
We have uncovered that an ‘ageing parent penalty’ exists and sadly mirrors the ‘child penalty’. In fact, in ‘family-based care countries,’ women primarily undertake the caregiving tasks for their parents, leading to a reduction in their paid work outside the home—a dynamic similar to mothers reducing their work after having a child. In ‘market-based care countries’, men often step in to fill the financial gap by working more to finance professional caregiving for their parents, akin to fathers increasing their work to cope with rising expenses after a child's birth.
In essence, our research highlights a pattern: a gap in elderly care is often filled by a daughter, while a financial gap is frequently filled by a son. This dynamic, if left unaddressed, widens adult children’s gender gap in employment.
Noa De La Vega is a Max Weber Fellow and a part-time Assistant Professor at the EUI Department of Economics, where she teaches a course on ‘Gender Economics’. De La Vega’s research mostly focuses on labour and gender economics.
Read ‘The Aging Parent Penalty Across Countries’ by Noa De La Vega and Stav Federman on SSRN.