Informal Caregiving and the Mental Health of the Young: Panel Evidence from Uruguay

Abstract This paper uses a two-wave panel of Uruguayan youth, followed from ages 12-15 in 2018 to 16-19 in 2022, to map the sociodemographic gradient of mental health across the transition to early adulthood and to ask how much of the association between unpaid caregiving and mental health is causal. The gradient runs along gender and family structure rather than income: young women and youth in father-absent households report substantially worse mental health, while the income gradient familiar from the adult literature is essentially flat. About half of the strong cross-sectional association between caregiving and worse mental health is selection; exploiting within-person variation, a significant effect survives, driven by the onset of caregiving -about a third of a standard deviation- concentrated in the care of an older or ill relative and corroborated by a bereavement benchmark. The effect is specific to well-being and does not extend to education, which guards against a selection interpretation. The estimates are treated as credibly identified, quasi-experimental evidence, and their sensitivity to unobserved selection and attrition is bounded. The paper provides the first panel evidence on youth caregiving and mental health for Latin America and a transparent, cross-wave-comparable mental-health measure. JEL: I14, I12, J13, J14, I31.