Informal carers provide the majority of care for people living with challenges related to older age, long-term illness, or disability. However, the care they provide often results in a significant income penalty for carers, a factor largely overlooked in the economics literature and policy discourse. Leveraging data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, this paper provides the first robust causal estimates of the caring income penalty using a novel individual synthetic control based method that accounts for unit-level heterogeneity in post-treatment trajectories over time. Our baseline estimates identify an average relative income gap of up to 45%, with an average decrease of {\pounds}162 in monthly income, peaking at {\pounds}192 per month after 4 years, based on the difference between informal carers providing the highest-intensity of care and their synthetic counterparts. We find that the income penalty is more pronounced for women than for men, and varies by ethnicity and age.

翻译：非正式照护者为应对老龄化、长期疾病或残疾相关挑战的人群提供了大部分照护服务。然而，他们提供的照护往往导致照护者遭受显著的收入损失，这一因素在经济学文献和政策讨论中常被忽视。本文利用英国家庭纵向研究数据，通过一种新颖的基于个体合成控制的方法，首次提供了对照护收入损失的稳健因果估计，该方法能够解释处理后轨迹在个体层面随时间变化的异质性。我们的基线估计表明，提供最高强度照护的非正式照护者与其合成对照组相比，平均相对收入差距高达45%，月收入平均减少162英镑，并在4年后达到每月192英镑的峰值。研究发现，收入损失对女性比对男性更为显著，且因种族和年龄而异。