Blood and Gender Bias in Informal Care within the Family?

his paper deals with the question of the relative contribution of children to the informal long- term care of their dependent parents. Starting from a theoretical model and using SHARE data, the paper focuses on the role of gender and blood relationships as well as the effect of differential opportunity costs within the couple. The results tend to confirm the existence of gender and blood biases in the level of informal care provided, whereas the probability of providing any care is only affected by the blood bias. If children are working, their time devoted to informal care decreases with their wage. There is no difference in the level of care provided by single children and married children. Finally, when only couples are considered, gender and blood biases are confirmed but the wage ratio has no impact on the relative level of informal care of the spouses. These results have two main policy implications: tagging public LTC transfers on the gender of children, and the adjustment of public LTC transfers to different levels of insurance coverage.