Mailing off to a summer fellowship today...

"Making ends meet while making mom comfortable: Long-term care provision and labor supply in African American and Latino families"

From the beginning of the proposal:

"...The two related research questions I propose to explore during the summer fellowship are:

1. What is the impact of long-term care responsibilities on the labor supply of African American and Latino families?

2. What is the wage elasticity of long-term care supply for African American and Latino families?

These two questions approach the same social science and policy issues around long-term care from two different directions. The first asks how labor market behavior adjusts when the need for care arises in a family. The second question explores how responsive care provision is to changes in labor market conditions facing families. Each of these questions has been explored in the literature on long-term care, and they can both be explored using the same data sources. For example, Ettner (1996), Johnson and Lo Sasso (2006), and van Houtven, Coe, and Skira (2013) provide careful treatments of my first proposed research question for the general population. Similarly, Nizalova (2012) investigates my second research question about the responsiveness of care to labor market conditions, using a nationally representative sample. Hover, the two questions are rarely considered together, and no one that I am aware of has explored the relationship between labor supply and long-term care provision in minority populations.

In my opinion, this is a major lacuna in our understanding of the pressures facing Americans with elderly or disabled family members in need of long-term care. African American and Latino families face disparities in labor market performance that constrain their ability to commit time to family members in needs. These constraints make understanding how minority families asses the opportunity cost of providing care critical to formulating long-term care policy."

There are many complications with long-term care policy. In a lot of ways it's an orphan of the health care discussion. I think this proposal should be intriguing and I can't really express how much I would like to win this fellowship. It's with a D.C. group and it's fairly generous - I won't say more in case the review is supposed to be blind.