Cancer Diagnoses’ Impacts on Family Incomes: Evidence from Canada

Abstract: Focusing on individual and family income, and their components, we estimate average treatment effects for those with cancer diagnoses in Canada.  Different (temporal) definitions of coupled and non-coupled households are employed to produce estimates by terciles of individual income. First, we find that the decrease in labour earnings is considerably but not fully mitigated by social insurance for both genders, and by non-labour income for diagnosed non-coupled males. Second, an added worker effect is observed for female partners of cancer survivors and a caregiver effect for male partners, but only in the second tercile of pre-diagnosis income of a cancer survivor. Also, the observed added-worker effect for wives originates from the upper two terciles of survival probabilities, while the caregiver effect for husbands originates from the lower two terciles. Finally, there are second-order effects of a cancer diagnosis due to the endogeneity of marital status (diagnosis related marital formation/dissolution) and related selection issues.

 

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