Flexible working is often advocated as a way to help people combine paid work with informal care. This paper uses matched employer-employee data to explore the association between employees’ access to flexible working arrangements and the amount of informal care they provide to sick or elderly friends and relatives. Investigating a range of flexible working practices, we find that flexitime arrangements and the ability to reduce working hours are each associated with about a 10% increase in hours of informal care. This effect is the same for men and women and there is little evidence of differences in the impact across occupational groups. However, the ability to reduce hours is mainly effective among full-time workers. There is also some evidence that flexitime has larger effects at low-levels of informal
Presented by:
Mark Bryan
Date & time:
April 8, 2009 12:00 pm - April 8, 2009 1:00 pm
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