Do Mothers Work to Support Ailing Husbands?

This paper analyzes the role of a spouse's poor health in forming the mother's labor force participation decision. The data are drawn from the 1996 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), which follows individuals for four years. This paper uses a medical expenditure approach to measuring health. Because SIPP is a panel dataset, changes in health and labor force participation can be observed. This paper finds an increase of 8% in the wife's labor force participation when the health of the spouse falls from excellent to poor. This result of the changes in the mother's labor force participation is consistent with previous literature, indicating that this new health measure performed well.