Well-being right before and after a permanent nursing home admission.

Permanent nursing home (NH) admissions are a frequent and major life event aimed at maintaining quality of life in old age. Yet, insights into the impact of a NH admission on well-being are scarce and inconclusive. We evaluate the effect of a NH admission on domains of well-being among those who are admitted using event study methodology for cross-sections combined with inverse probability weighting. We apply this doubly robust approach to Dutch survey data on well-being linked to extensive administrative data on NH admissions, health, and socio-economic status. We find that a NH admission leads to a temporary increase in loneliness, the risk of anxiety and depression, and a loss of control over one's life. However, these scores revert to pre-admission levels after 6 months. These findings may contribute to better-informed individual-level and policy decisions about potential NH entry and aging in place policies.

The kids are alright - labour market effects of unexpected parental hospitalisations in the Netherlands.

Unexpected negative health shocks of a parent may reduce adult children's labour supply via informal caregiving and stress-induced mental health problems. We link administrative data on labour market outcomes, hospitalisations and family relations for the full Dutch working age population for the years 1999-2008 to evaluate the effect of an unexpected parental hospitalisation on the probability of employment and on conditional earnings. Using an event study difference-in-differences model combined with coarsened exact matching and individual fixed effects, we find no effect of an unexpected parental hospitalisation on either employment or earnings for Dutch men and women, and neither for the full population nor for the subpopulations most likely to become caregivers. These findings suggest that the extensive public coverage of formal long-term care in the Netherlands combined with widespread acceptance of part-time work provides sufficient opportunities to deal with adverse health events of family members without having to compromise one's labour supply.