Sharing the caring? Dynamic interaction between siblings in the provision of care to parents

Adult daughters provide nearly three times as many hours of care to elderly parents as adult sons do. I analyse the role of strategic interaction between siblings in exacerbating this gap in care provision. To do so, I build and estimate a dynamic discrete-choice game in which siblings make location, work and care choices. I find that the opportunity for strategic play increases gender differences in caring responsibilities: sons in particular strategically shirk providing care, as they believe their sibling is relatively likely to provide care in their absence. Counterfactual experiments show that if strategic interaction were eliminated by each child instead taking their sibling’s care provision as fixed at the population average, the gender care gap in son-daughter families would be 18-20\% smaller. Unobserved preference differences between sons and daughters are far more important in driving the gender care gap than differences in earnings, suggesting that policies to close the gender earnings gap may make little difference to the gender care gap. Cooperation between siblings would raise care provision but widen the gender care gap in absolute terms, as daughters would take on more of the additional care.