Parental unemployment and child health

Author: Eva Mörk, And Anna Sjögren, And Helena Svaleryd, And

Published in: CESifo Economic Studies, 2014, vol. 60, no. 2, pp. 366-401

Summary of Working paper 2014:8

We analyze to what extent health outcomes of Swedish children are worse among children whose parents become unemployed. To this end we combine Swedish hospitalization data for 1992-2007 for children 3-18 years of age with register data on parental unemployment. We find that children with unemployed parents are 17 percent more likely to be hospitalized than other children, but that most of the difference is driven by selection. A child fixed-effects approach suggests a small effect of parental unemployment on child health.