Long-term Care Insurance and the Eldercare Workers' Wages: The Case of South Korea

This study investigates how the introduction of compulsory long-term care insurance has affected the wages of eldercare workers in South Korea. I obtained 94,457 observations from 12,600 employees using the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study data. Using a difference -in -differences approach, I compare eldercare workers with other workers in terms of their wage growth rates before and after the policy introduction. The evidence indicates that the policy increased the wages of eldercare workers. More interestingly, eldercare workers, mostly women aged 50 or older, are given lower wage returns for job experience than other occupations, and these returns have further decreased after the policy introduction. This study challenges the notion that welfare -state expansion guarantees women's improved status at work and calls for more attention to care workers' working conditions in the defamilialization of care.