Informal Care and Economic Stressors11In this chapter, I use the term informal care because it is a standard term used in the academic literature. The term is intended to distinguish care from family members and friends, who are typically untrained and unpaid, from formal care, in which care is provided by paid, and usually trained, semiprofessionals or professionals who have no preexisting personal relationship with the care recipient. An alternative term is family caregiver, but I prefer the term informal caregiver because it does not exclude care provided by nonfamily members. In addition, the word informal reflects the reality that caregiving in the United States typically occurs in an informal market, where there are no explicit prices for the services provided, with rarely explicit direct payments, and it is therefore very difficult to quantify directly the supply, cost, or value of informal care. The very absence of a market for caregiving has spurred a great deal of economics (and other) research in understanding the value and costs of informal care in the United States and internationally, due to labor market impacts, health impacts, and other unintended consequences of caregiving.
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