Estimating the Cost of Informal Care with a Novel Two-Stage Approach to Individual Synthetic Control 

GOLTC QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL METHODS Interest Group webinar 

 Date: 27 May 2025 

Time: 14:00 – 15:00 BST 

Informal carers provide the majority of care for people living with challenges related to older age, long-term illness, or disability. However, the care they provide often results in a significant income penalty for carers, a factor largely overlooked in the economics literature and policy discourse. Leveraging data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, this paper provides the first robust causal estimates of the caring income penalty using a novel individual synthetic control-based method.

The webinar will cover:  

• Introduction to the Global Observatory of Long-Term care and the Quasi-Experimental Methods and welcome (Adelina Comas-Herrera, Care Policy and Evaluation Centre, LSE, UK).

• Introduction to the GOLTC Interest Group (Javiera Cartagena-Farias, CPEC at LSE) 

• Presentation: Estimating the Cost of Informal Care with a Novel Two-Stage Approach to Individual Synthetic Control (Maria Petrillo, The University of Sheffield, UK)  

• Discussion: Megan Doheny, Karolinska Institute