CERGAS Seminar "Care, work, and ageing: policy design, access to support, and hidden costs"

Ageing societies face a double constraint: rising needs for long-term care and tighter fiscal and workforce capacity. Emerging empirical evidence suggests that well designed care systems can generate returns beyond the care sector itself, including intergenerational spillovers through families, labour markets, and health. In this seminar I connect several ongoing empirical projects that examine how social care and work related policies shape societal welfare through access to support, caregiving behaviour, and health outcomes.
First, I discuss how long-term care eligibility rules and benefit design translate need into entitlements, and why apparently technical assessment thresholds can strongly affect potential access to care. This includes ongoing work on England’s Attendance Allowance and on how public social care spending relates to access. Second, I present evidence on long-term care use and mental health, highlighting how receiving support can affect well-being outcomes for older individuals. Third, I examine how retirement policies that extend working lives reshape informal caregiving and care utilisation, and how working conditions can amplify or mitigate these effects. Fourth, I broaden the lens to working conditions and worker health, combining published evidence from the UK with ongoing work for Europe. Finally, I introduce work in progress on the economic costs of dementia for older Europeans, framing dementia as a major driver of care needs and financial risk that is often only partially captured in conventional policy evaluations.

Speaker:

Ludovico Carrino is Associate Professor of Public Economics at the University of Trieste and Visiting Senior Lecturer at King’s College London. He is an applied health economist specialising in long-term care, ageing and pensions, and the social determinants of health. He has advised the World Health Organization (WHO Kobe Centre for Health Development) and collaborates with policy and statistical institutions including the OECD and the UK Office for National Statistics. He is a co-investigator on the Gateway to Global Aging Data project and leads its local unit at the University of Trieste. He is co-author of books on the economics of long-term care and has published in journals including Health Economics, Labour Economics, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Social Science & Medicine, and the Journal of Gerontology.

Link zoom:

https://unibocconi-it.zoom.us/j/99470726868?pwd=P2ficQIamE5JxK0zwgHUQhQMyW8oFr.1

Meeting ID:

994 7072 6868

Passcode:

957123

Lunch at the end of the meeting: for those willing to participate in person, click here before the 18th of February.