The Effects Of Job Loss On The Family PDF Download

Job loss is a permanent and common feature of modern economies. While much is known about the impact of job loss on earnings, income, unemployment and consumption, much less attention has been given to the effects that parents' job displacement has on children. Chapter I of this dissertation presents the analytical framework for the empirical analysis that follows in Chapters II and III. Specifically, I describe the pathways potentially linking parental job loss to children's outcomes. These pathways fall into two broad categories, the investment perspective and the family process perspective. In Chapter II, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) I find that parental job loss between the ages of 0-17 reduces the probability that offspring will graduate from high school by roughly 6 percent. The impact on college attendance, conditional on high school graduation, is more sensitive to controls for parental ability but ranges from 2 to 7 percent. Family income, wealth and government assistance fail to explain the job-loss effect on high school graduation but explain much of the effect on conditional college attendance. The severity of the impact varies by the age of the offspring at the time the displacement occurred. In Chapter III, using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Children and Young Adults Cohort (CNLSY) I find that a parental job loss leads to increases in antisocial behavior, anxiety/depression and lower reading scores among children. The age of the child at the time of the displacement has important consequences on the severity and duration of the effect. Household-level fixed effects explain much of this relationship. I conclude Chapter III with a discussion of the policy implications of these findings.