earticle

영어

This study analyses the effects of caring grandchildren on Korean grandparents' health using the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging from 2006 to 2012. We investigate how caregiving is provided and analyze the effects of caregiving on grandparents' physical, mental health and health related behaviors. As elderly people's health is generally frail, whether the provisions of child care deteriorate their health is not clear. We control endogeniety of caregiving by individual fixed effect (FE) model and instrumental variable-fixed effect (FE-IV) models. Using these models, we find endogeneity of caregiving and show the significant effect of caregiving on health disappears as we control endogeneity in FE and FE-IV models. Even after controling endogeneity, we find caregiving increases the probability of feeling pain as well as the number of different types of pain. Further, caregiving increases the probability of having restrictions on daily activities because of pain. On the other hand, caregiving reduces depression symptom. In health related behaviors, caregiving reduces the probability of physical exercise and having meals regularly. Our results imply that although caregiving has a positive effect on mental health, increase in physical pain and non-healthy behaviors potentially may lead to the deterioration of the caregiver's long term health, which in turn may increase medical costs of the elderly. Potential policy alternatives are discussed in the paper.