BABY-BOOMERS &HEALTH CARE NEEDS OF ELDERLY PARENTS

University Of Michigan At Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

DESCRIPTION: The goal of this project is to learn more about effects of elderly parents' health care heeds on the work patterns of their baby-boom children and how the behavior of the baby-boomers compares to that of earlier cohorts. Intergenerational transfers to ailing parents are central to this investigation, and the primary interest is in gauging the extent to which changes in children's labor market participation are engendered by providing those transfers. Attention is centered on both actual changes in work hours and in the children's reports about whether assisting frail elderly parents meant changing work hours. Baby- boomers and prior cohorts (born 1935-44) are the subjects of the research. The analysis is aimed at examining differences in patterns across these groups. Patterns to be compared include: levels of transfers, actual changes in work hours, extent to which transfers engendered changes in work hours, and associations between transfers to frail elderly parents and the adult children's histories of social, economic and demographic circumstances and behaviors. This project involves assembling a data file from the 1968-1993 main files of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and its 1993 Health Care Burden Supplemental File. The unique contributions of this research are: (1) concentration on baby-boomers with comparisons to earlier cohorts, (2) investigation of both actual changes in work hours and respondents' perceptions as to whether the changes were attributable to providing parental transfers, and (3) the use of a wide variety of long-term measures of the socioeconomic and demographic circumstances of families to provide insight into the circumstances likely to prompt particular types of work changes in order to provide transfers to ailing parents.