Parental job loss and child human capital in the short and long run

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

Published in: Labour Economics (September 2020), online first

Summary of Working paper 2019:3

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