Growing numbers of people help and support family members, friends or others due to long-term health problems, disability or older age–related needs. While care-giving can bring fulfilment and meaning to peoples’ lives, it can negatively affect individuals’ financial wellbeing. Much of the evidence in this area is quantitative, while the subjective, in-depth experience of how unpaid care decisions affect financial wellbeing remains relatively underexplored. This scoping review explores what is known about how unpaid carers experience and understand the financial consequences of providing care. It identified 35 studies containing qualitative evidence and, through thematic analysis, identified four overarching themes: (1) direct and indirect costs of caring; (2) social, cultural and institutional care and work decision-making; (3) the unequal cost of caring; and (4) personal finance and carer wellbeing. Findings indicate that unpaid caring affects financial wellbeing in multiple, overlapping ways. The financial consequences are experienced unequally, with systems, circumstances and contexts serving to exacerbate or reduce these negative effects. Crucially, our analysis reveals the paucity of qualitative research specifically focused on unpaid carers’ financial wellbeing. There is a significant gap in the literature regarding whether, and how, individuals understand the future financial implications of unpaid care-giving, or whether longer-term financial consequences are considered when making decisions about care. Future research designed to address this gap, with greater emphasis on the personal, social and structural influences on care-related financial decision-making, could offer important insights for developing policies and practices aimed at improving the financial wellbeing of carers as they age.

The generosity of maternity pay has been shown to be an important factor for mothers’ attachment to the labour market. In the UK, we can observe that the generosity of maternity leaves across universities varies greatly: some universities top up the statutory maternity pay with longer and better paid leaves, others are either less generous or only entitle academic women to the legal minimum. We want to understand why this is the case. Therefore, this article examines both theoretically and empirically how higher education employers decide about the generosity of the offered occupational maternity pay. We use a bargaining approach to model the supply and demand side of generous maternity benefits in universities with different characteristics and test the implications with a generalised negative binomial model. We find that universities’ income does not account for this variation while differences in terms of costs and benefits for employers do. Most importantly, our results show that more research intense universities with a higher previous share of female professors provide more generous maternity pay. We offer a range of explanations for these findings.

The effects of considering variable within-farm soil runoff and leaching potential on costs of reducing nitrogen losses are analyzed for a Virginia dairy. Manure applications may cause nitrogen losses through runoff and leaching because of factors such as uncertain nitrogen mineralization. Farmers can reduce nitrogen control costs by applying manure on soils with less nitrogen loss potential. Ignoring within-farm soil variability may result in overstating the farm's costs of reducing nitrogen losses.

Background: There is no previous information about economic costs of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in South America. The objective of this study was to evaluate the costs of AD in Argentina.

Methods: Eighty community-dwelling patients, 20 institutionalized AD patients and their respective primary caregivers, and 25 healthy elderly subjects participated in this study. The cognitive and neuropsychiatric impairments and severity of dementia were assessed with the Mini-mental State Examination, Neuropsychiatric Inventory and Clinical Dementia Rating, respectively. A structured interview about health and health-care resources used during the past 3 months was administered to family caregivers. The time devoted by carers to looking after the patients and the caregiver burden (Zarit's Burden Interview) were recorded.

Results: The annual direct costs of the disease increased with cognitive deterioration from US$3420.40 in mild to US$9657.60 in severe AD, and with institutionalization (US$3189.20 outpatient vs. US$14 447.68 institutionalized). Most direct costs were paid for by the family.

Conclusions: With the projected increase in the number of persons at risk for developing AD in emerging countries, the family cost of the disease will be significant. Dementia costs should be a matter of analysis when health policies are being designed in developing countries.