Résumé en anglais

This paper focuses on the trade-off between formal and informal care for elderly dependents living at home in France. Using the French 2008 household Disability - Healthcare data and a newly built indicator of formal home-care prices in each French Council District, we wonder if fi nancial incentives to use more formal home care could relieve informal caregivers. We estimate a bivariate Tobit model to account for both the censor and the endogeneity of our formal home-care variable. Our results con firm that the volume of informal care provided would decreaseif the elderly dependents were faced with lower formal home-care prices. Moreover, informal caregivers are shown to be much more sensitive to public subsidizes for skilled formal home care than for the low-skilled one. Subsidizing for skilled formal home care would make informal caregivers more effcient to perform lighter low-skilled tasks. Eventually, acting on formal home care prices could help French public administrators sustain the well-being of both care receivers and informal caregivers.