Informal care and savings.

Using panel data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, this paper examines to what extent informal care provided by couples and single individuals affects their household savings. This paper is one of the first attempts to examine the relationship between informal care and savings. There are both negative and positive effects of informal care on wealth accumulation, but we do not know which of these effects dominate. We estimate quantile regression models and find that informal care provision has limited negative impacts on changes in household wealth formation. There was no effect of caring on wealth formation for the lower quantile and the negative effects are limited to the mid to high quantile groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]