Location: Monsanto Room
Time: 2:30pm-3:50pm
Moderator: Dr. Chi-Fang Wu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Faculty Speaker:
“Three Models for Compensating Family Caregivers”
Dr. Richard L. Kaplan, College of Law, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Women make up the vast majority of informal caregivers, almost all of which is provided without charge. Such unpaid care, however, has major implications for the future financial security of these caregivers, especially as societies continue moving to a defined contribution paradigm for funding retirement needs. This paper examines three distinct mechanisms to compensate such caregivers and thereby mitigate the extent of their financial sacrifice.
The first mechanism is publicly funded social insurance that pays informal caregivers, including family members. This mechanism is considered in the context of the 2010 U.S. health reform legislation known as the Affordable Care Act, which included a program along these lines.
The second mechanism is tax incentives to encourage families to pay informal caregivers and thereby leverage private resources with public funds in the form of foregone tax revenues. This mechanism is examined in the context of U.S. tax deductions of medical expenses, which include long-term care services.
The final mechanism is legal contracts to pay informal caregivers for the services they provide as employees of the care receiver through “family caregiver agreements.” These contracts are analyzed in terms of their income tax, public benefits eligibility, retirement financing, and intergenerational wealth transmission implications.
Doctoral Students:
“Does labor formalization impose externalities on informally employed women?: Considering unpaid care”
Lenore Matthew, School of Social Work, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Across countries of the Global South, upwards of 80 percent of workers are informally employed. Most are poor women. In an effort to regulate informal work, governments are experimenting with labor formalization strategies. Classic economics theory predicts that formalization will improve the livelihood of informal workers, particularly poor females. Such assumptions, however, do not take into account the burden of unpaid care that women disproportionately endure. This article examines dominant assumptions in literature by considering externalities of formalization on female workers. It argues that while formalization stands to improve informally employed women’s socioeconomic well-being, formalization restructures women’s caregiving strategies in a way that imposes financial, time-oriented, and psychosocial costs. These costs may offset benefits of entering the formal sector. If labor formalization is to include—rather than further marginalize—poor women, policies must take the care burden into account. Incorporating caregiving programs into formalization measures may be an effective strategy.
“Breaking Through Barriers: Marketplace Engagement as a Self-Empowering Mechanism among Female Subsistence Entrepreneurs”
Srinivas Venugopal, College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Prior work in economics has labeled subsistence entrepreneurship “under-productive” and lacking in “explosive growth”. I submit in this article that subsistence entrepreneurship is a potent mechanism for self-empowerment as a consumer, and as an individual. It is an agentic action on the part of poor women, who are underprivileged on multiple fronts, to transform their own condition. Specifically, I investigate how being engaged in subsistence entrepreneurship transform the individual entrepreneur. I expand the analysis beyond economic outcomes to include outcomes in the form of psychological empowerment and exercise of individual agency. The most important contribution of the research lies in theorizing the process through which marketplace engagement through entrepreneurship could be empowering for women entrepreneurs facing multiple sources of hardship as a consumer.