The impact of providing informal care on carer well-being, retirement, and health.

This thesis includes a series of case studies exploring the impact of providing informal (unpaid) care on the well-being, retirement decisions, and physical and mental health outcomes of carers. We use a representative sample of the UK population and informal carers from eighteen waves of the British Household Survey (BHPS). Analysis is undertaken from an economic and micro-econometrics perspective, using a variety of econometric techniques tailored to the specific questions and data in each study. The first chapter introduces the topics and provides descriptive statistics of the sample of carers in BHPS. In the second chapter, we study the impact of providing informal care on happiness and life satisfaction and calculate monetary values for informal care for each of these subjective well-being measures and by gender. We find monetary values of around £18 per extra hour of informal care provided per week for men and women in our preferred model, although values vary with the well-being measure, the measure of informal care, and the estimation method used. In chapter three we study whether the decision to retire before the State Pension Age is affected by the intensity of the informal care provided by men and women. We find that the probability of retirement is around twice as high for carers than for non-carers. Chapter 4 analyses the impact of providing informal care on caregiver´s health, using a variety of health measures: GHQ, SF-6D, health conditions and self-assessed health. We find a small but negative effect of providing informal care on both the physical and mental health of informal carers. With these analyses, we aim to contribute to the literature by providing evidence on the impact of informal caring on carers to inform policy towards them and those they care for.