  This paper examines the long-term gender-specific impacts of parental health
shocks on adult children's employment in China. We build up an inter-temporal
cooperative framework to analyze household work decisions in response to
parental health deterioration. Then employing an event-study approach, we
establish a causal link between parental health shocks and a notable decline in
female employment rates. Male employment, however, remains largely unaffected.
This negative impact shows no abatement up to eight years that are observable
by the sample. These findings indicate the consequence of "growing old before
getting rich" for developing countries.
