Where to Live? The Locational Decisions of Young Adults and Later Parental Care

Kathleen McGarry, University of California, Los Angeles
Emily Wiemers, University of Massachusetts at Boston

The majority of care for the elderly is provided informally by family members. For elderly women, adult children are the most likely providers of this care. And among children, it is typically the child who lives closest to the parent who provides the majority of care. However, living arrangements are likely determined in part by the need (or anticipated need) of providing care. In this paper we propose an instrumental variables approach for estimating the effect of distance on caregiving. We find that distance is still an important determinant of care, but that is effect is approximately 20 percent smaller. We also find important differences in the importance of schooling when an exogenous measure of distance is included in a regression of the determinants of care.