The heterogeneous effects of the great recession on informal care to the elderly.

This paper studies the role of unobserved factors to measure the impact of the economic downturn on informal care availability to the elderly in Europe. We use the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), which allows controlling for socio-demographic variables. Our results show that the impact of the Great Recession on care receipt depends not only on observed, but also on unobserved characteristics.