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：非正式照护者为因年老、长期患病或残疾而面临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大多被忽视。本文利用英国家庭纵向研究数据，首次采用基于个体合成控制的新型方法，通过考虑处理后个体轨迹随时间变化的异质性，提供了对照护收入损失的稳健因果估计。我们的基线估计发现，基于提供最高强度照护的非正式照护者与其合成对照组之间的差异，平均相对收入差距最高可达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，女性比男性遭受的收入损失更为显著，且该损失因种族和年龄而异。