Policy and Practice
The Politics of Grief: Making Loss an Issue
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Thomas Geldmacher, Daniela Musiol
We grow older, we work longer, and by 2025, 40 percent of the work force will be made up of 50- to 65-year olds who are about to lose their parents. Every year in Austria alone, roughly 12,000 persons die while still employed, leaving behind grieving relatives and grieving colleagues. And yet bereavement is still considered an essentially individual affair whose place is the private realm but which should not be bothered with in public, let alone in the workplace. But an ageing society makes us think about death even harder. So it is time for politics to address the grief issue – not only because it is the right thing to do but also because avoiding it will cost a lot of money due to absenteeism, presentism, and psychological illnesses as a consequence of suppressed grief. It is the aim of the research we're conducting to bridge the gap between theory and political practice, making available a survey of select national grief-related policies and proposing legislative measures in order to deal with grief and bereavement not only, but specifically in professional environments. Law defines norms. What is codified by law, becomes normal. So implementing grief in legislation is our best chance to acknowledge it as a normal part of life, not as some exotic illness.
Informal Caregiving and Work - a High Price to Pay: The Case of the Baltic States - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Irina Mozhaeva
Based on EU-SILC 2016 year data, this study analyses the effect of informal care obligations on labour market outcomes in the three Baltic States - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, measured by labor force participation, employment, and the number of hours worked. We also estimate wage penalties related to informal caregiving among the employed males and females. While in wealthier countries, where substitution effect of caring usually exceeds income effect (Carmicheal and Charles, 1998), informal caregivers are found to have less attachment to the labor force, we conclude that in poorer countries like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania the income effect is relatively strong and therefore informal caregiving, in particular co-residential, positively affects both male and female decision to join labour force. However, caring has negative effect on chances of employment (given labour force participation) and the supply of working hours. Wage penalties related to informal caregiving are found to be greater for females, who contrast to males relatively more often accept intensive care burden and are usually the main caregivers in their households. We discuss the gender-related differences and socio-economic consequences in the three countries analyzed. To address endogeneity of the informal care variables in the labour force, employment and wage equations, we apply instrumental variable method. The results obtained using ivreg2 Stata command proposed by Baum, Shaffer, and Stillman (2002) are coherent to those obtained after ivprobit and ivregress. To address the sample selection bias resulting from individual selection into the different labour market statuses we apply the Heckman correction (1976,1979).
How Longevity and Social Isolation Affect Consumption and Saving Behavior Among Elderly People : Drawing Prospect Theory on Life-cycle Hypothesis
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yuko Nozaki
According to the life-cycle hypothesis (LCH), whereby elderly people draw on the assets which they accumulated during their working lives, aging society is likely to reduce the savings rate of the country as a whole. However, when looking at the household savings rate in terms of age brackets, employed elderly people have higher savings rates than the younger ones and retired ones also have strong wariness when it comes to spending money. Lots of empirical studies have concluded that LCH is not convincing. Therefore, they attempt to explain by employing the following two hypotheses: 1)“precautionary motive” which refers to the unexpected health problems, 2) “bequest motive” which refers to the desire to leave things to their offspring. In spite of the accumulation of economic studies, there have not been sufficient responses to these two motives. Japanese elderly people do not have these two motives, since the medical insurance/long-term care insurance system has already been enhanced, and the number of single households and unmarried people among the elderly people has dramatically increased. Prospect theory combines important ideas from psychology and economics into an eclectic model of decision-making. This theory exists in the context of both risk and uncertainty and it has been applied to individual decision making in various kind of situations. Based on prospect theory, this study demonstrates the impact of elderly people's risk aversion towards consumption/saving behavior, shedding light on psychological factors such as social isolation due to longevity using Japanese data.
