Parental Job Loss and Children's School Performance (original) (raw)
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Parental job loss and child human capital in the short and long run
2019
We study the effects of parental job loss on children’s health, educational achievement and labor market success as young adults. Past evidence shows mixed results which could be due to small sample sizes and that workers who suffer job loss are a selected group. Using Swedish register data, including more than 140,000 children whose parents were displaced due to workplace closures, and conditioning on a wide set of pretreatment outcomes of both parents and children, we find no effects of parental job loss on childhood health, school performance or outcomes as young adults although parents are negatively affected.
Labour Economics, 2008
Based on matched employer-employee data from Norway, we analyze the effects of worker displacement in 1986-1987 on their children's earnings in 1999-2001. Using displacement of fathers to indicate an exogenous earnings shock we seek to identify whether family resources have a direct effect on children's economic outcome. As in previous Scandinavian studies, we find the intergenerational earnings mobility to be fairly high compared to the U.S. and the U.K. Displacement appears to have a negative effect on earnings and employment of those affected, while we find no significant effects on offspring.
Parental Job Loss, Parental Ability and Children’s Educational Attainment
2012
The recent recession has focused attention on the effects of job loss and unemployment, but job loss is a common experience even during times of economic expansion. While much is known about the impact of job loss on the earnings, income, and unemployment of adults, less is understood regarding the relationship between parental displacement and children’s outcomes. I estimate the effect of parental job loss on children’s educational attainment. In particular, I focus on the role of parental ability, both cognitive and non-cognitive, using observed measures of parents’ attributes and an instrumental variable analysis to account for unobserved attributes. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) I find that experiencing a parental job loss during childhood reduces the probability that an offspring will obtain any post-secondary education (by age 21) by at least 10 percent and perhaps as high as 50 percent. Furthermore, household resources, including family income and wealth, do...
The Timing of Parental Job Displacement, Child Development and Family Adjustment
SSRN Electronic Journal
This paper examines if the effect of parental labor market shocks on child development depends on the age of the child at the time of the shock. To address this question, we leverage rich Norwegian population-wide register data and exploit mass layoffs and establishment closures as a source of exogenous variation in parental labor market shocks. We find that, even though displacement episodes early in children's lives have the largest impacts on household income (because they persist for many years), displacement episodes occurring in the children's teenage years have the largest effects on human capital accumulation. We show that most of the effects operate through the intensive margin of schooling, and that children-across childhood-are significantly more influenced by maternal labor shocks compared to paternal labor shocks. In terms of mechanisms, we show that the heterogeneous effects across child age likely are driven by short-term increases in maternal stress rather than by differences in how the parents respond to the shocks.
Parental Unemployment: How Much and When Does it Matter for Children’s Educational Attainment?
This study examines the effect of parents' involuntary unemployment on their children's subsequent educational attainment. Its theoretical significance lies on its focus to test the mediating role of parents' changing work ethics during spells of unemployment. Integrating multiple survey and administrative data sources, our estimates are based on a sample of Dutch children (n=812) who were exposed to their parents' unemployment during the previous economic crisis in the early 1980s. Our results reveal a direct negative effect between fathers' unemployment duration and their children's educational attainment and also an indirect effect through mothers' changing attitudes towards work. Our findings imply that children's educational success is partly contingent upon mother's ability to cope with her husband's unemployment. Overall, our study shows the power of positive work ethics to bridge the intergenerational scars of unemployment while it supports the hypothesis that stability in the socioeconomic resources of the family is key for children's later educational success.
Parental Unemployment: How much and when does it matter for Children’s Educational Achievements
This study examines the effect of parents' involuntary unemployment on their children's subsequent educational attainment. Its theoretical significance lies on its focus to test the mediating role of parents' changing work ethics during spells of unemployment. Integrating multiple survey and administrative data sources, our estimates are based on a sample of Dutch children (n=812) who were exposed to their parents' unemployment during the previous economic crisis in the early 1980s. Our results reveal a direct negative effect between fathers' unemployment duration and their children's educational attainment and also an indirect effect through mothers' changing attitudes towards work. Our findings imply that children's educational success is partly contingent upon mother's ability to cope with her husband's unemployment. Overall, our study shows the power of positive work ethics to bridge the intergenerational scars of unemployment while it supports the hypothesis that stability in the socioeconomic resources of the family is key for children's later educational success.
Fiscal Studies, 2012
The research on intergenerational correlations in outcomes is increasingly moving from measurement into assessment of causal transmission mechanisms. This paper analyses the causal impact of fathers' job loss on their children's educational attainment and later economic outcomes. To do so, we isolate the effect of job loss associated with major industry contractions, mainly in manufacturing, during the recession of the 1980s by mapping industry-level employment change data from 1980 to 1983 into the British Cohort Study (BCS). Children with fathers who were identified as being displaced did significantly worse in terms of their GCSE attainment than those with non-displaced fathers. A child with a displaced father obtained, on average, 18 grade points lower or half a GCSE at grades A*-C less than their otherwise-identical counterparts, the equivalent of about 2 per cent lower wages as an adult. There is also a small effect of fathers'
Parental Job Loss and Children's Careers
SSRN Electronic Journal
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Parental disruption and the labour market performance of children when they reach adulthood
Journal of Population Economics, 2001
This paper uses data from the age 33 wave of the British National Child Development Survey (NCDS) to analyze the e¨ects of a parental disruption (divorce or death of a father) on the labour market performance of children when they reach adulthood. The NCDS is a longitudinal study of all children born during the ®rst week of March 1958 in England, Scotland, and Wales. Controlling for a rich set of pre-disruption characteristics, the results indicate that a parental disruption leads to moderately less employment among males and considerably lower wage rates among females at age 33. If pre-disruption characteristics are not controlled for, larger e¨ects are estimated for both males and females. Parental disruption also seems to cause substantial reductions in educational attainment for both males and females.