The Impact Of Middle-aged And Elderly Caring For Grandchildren On Labor Participation

With the deepening of population aging and the increasing of average life expectancy,the employment of the middle-aged and elderly has gradually drawn the attention of the society.In addition to personal factors such as work experience,ability and personal interest,the factors affecting labor participation of the middle-aged and elderly also include family factors.And the caring for grandchildren is an important aspect of family factors.When faced with the choice between caring for grandchildren and labor participation,what choice will the middle-aged and elderly make? And are there differences in their decisions?This paper summarizes the relevant research at home and abroad,and learns the theory of work-leisure,the theory of household labor supply.Based on the data of CHARLS 2015,this paper selects labor participation and labor time as the dependent variables,caring for grandchildren and the intensity of caring for grandchildren as the core independent variables,and selects individual characteristics and family characteristics as the control variables.In this paper,the Heckman model and Two-part model are used to analysis the data with stata14.0 analysis software.And this paper selects instrumental variables to deal with the endogenous problem between caring for grandchildren and labor participation.The results show that:(1)Caring for grandchildren has a significant negative impact on labor participation rate and labor supply time of the middle-aged and elderly;If the intensive of caring for grandchildren is high,the middle-aged and elderly might drop out of the labor force or reduce the work time;(2)From the point of view of gender,middle-aged and elderly women are more likely to drop out of the labor market or reduce work hours because of caring for grandchildren;(3)According to the urban and rural samples,caring for grandchildren reduces the labor participation rate of the middle-aged and elderly in cities and reduces the labor time of the middle-aged and elderly in rural areas.(4)From the point of view of age stage,the caring for grandchildren predisposes the middle-aged people in urban and rural areas to quit labor and reduces the working time of the middle-aged people in rural areas.(5)Further analysis shows that caring for grandchildren predisposes the middle-aged and elderly to choose informal work and reduces their working time.Based on the above research conclusions,this paper believes that the government should improve the development of infant care and child education service industry,and reduce the burden of caring for grandchildren for the middle-aged and elderly.And the government should provide flexible work and flexible retirement policies for the middle-aged and elderly to improve the work enthusiasm of the middle-aged and elderly.There are two innovations of this article.First,this article takes the caring for grandchildren as the starting point when we study the labor participation of the middle-aged and elderly.Second,this paper includes two indicators of labor supply: labor participation rate and labor time.And it increases the explanatory power of the effect of caring for grandchildren on labor participation of the middle-aged and elderly.The disadvantage of this paper is that the data do not contain the age information of minor grandchildren.So it is not possible to study the impact of caring needs at different ages on labor participation of middle-aged and elderly people.This paper will continue to deepen the research in the future.