Introduction
One in seven UK workers provide informal care. Previous research has focused on the labour supply impacts of informal care such as participation, hours and earnings. However, it is unclear how caregiving impacts the productivity of those who combine work and informal care. Amongst this population, we analyse two measures of productivity: (i) presenteeism (reduced productivity whilst working) and (ii) absenteeism (missed workdays).

Data
We use all 14 waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Study. We measure presenteeism using responses to three questions from the Short Form-12 questionnaire. We measure absenteeism by classifying respondents who have missed any days of work in the last week due to either personal/family reasons or being sick/injured. We categorise carers as high intensity (20+ hours of care per week) or low intensity (1-19 hours per week).

Methods
We apply both fixed and random effects regression techniques which capture the static impacts of caregiving. Additionally, we apply a dynamic event study design that captures pre-trends in our outcomes.

Results
Our final sample consists of 222,236 individual-wave observations from 47,953 employed individuals. 12.4% of the sample experienced presenteeism, and 1.3% experienced absenteeism. We find that high and low intensity carers are 3.57 and 0.64 percentage points more likely to report presenteeism than non-carers, respectively, using a random effects specification. The magnitude for (high intensity) women (3.80 percentage points) is higher than for men (2.96). Using a fixed effect specification, we find that high intensity carers are 1.55 percentage points more likely to report presenteeism. High intensity carers are 1.22 percentage points more likely to report absenteeism.

Conclusion
Employed informal carers are more likely to experience presenteeism and absenteeism than employed non-carers, which is larger for intensive and female carers. Productivity losses due to informal caregiving are underestimated if they do not consider presenteeism and absenteeism.

Co-authors

Dr Sean Urwin; Professor Matt Sutton, University of Manchester