ArticleHealth economics2025
There Is No Place Like Home: The Impact of Public Home-Based Care on the Mental Health and Well-Being of Older People.
Article in Health economics, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Harmonizing measures of cross-country policies for aging research: applications to education, pension, and long-term care systems.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2026Article
- Evaluating LTC Policies Around the World: A Virtual Special Issue Promoted by the Gateway to Global Aging Data Project.Health economics · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Despite a significant policy shift from institutional to home-based care for older adults, evidence on the effectiveness of policies incentivizing home care is limited. This study provides novel evidence on the causal effect of public home-based care on the mental health and well-being of older people. To address endogenous selection, we implement a novel instrumental variable approach that exploits eligibility rules for long-term care as defined in national legislations. We link longitudinal data from the Survey of Health, Aging & Retirement in Europe (SHARE, 2004-2017) to national LTC eligibility rules in France, Germany, Spain and Belgium (disaggregated for Wallonia and Flanders regions) and examine how exogenous variation in the use of long-term care caused by varying eligibility rules impacts depressive symptoms (EURO-D scale), quality of life (CASP scale) and loneliness (R-UCLA scale). We find that receiving formal home-based care significantly reduces depressive symptom scores by 2.6 points (large effect size measured by Cohen's d) and the risk of depression by 13 percentage points. The use of home-based formal care also increases quality of life as measured by the CASP scale, particularly by increasing feelings of control over life. We show that one potential mechanism involves the impact of home-based care on loneliness: we estimate that receiving formal home-based care reduces the risk of loneliness by 6.7 percentage points. Our results provide evidence that an increase in home-based care coverage is justified in terms of improved mental health and well-being outcomes for older people.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.