Formal long-term care expansions and their ripple effects on family care, health, and work

Populations worldwide are aging, intensifying the challenge of meeting long-term care (LTC) needs. While formal LTC programs aim to address this demand, less is known about how they interact with informal caregiving and affect caregiver health and labor outcomes. This paper exploits the staggered expansion of Medicaid Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS) waivers across U.S. states to examine these effects. Using data from 1998 to 2018 with approximately 20,600 observations, our sample consis