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Author: Wightman, Patrick
Resulting in 2 citations.
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Wightman, Patrick |
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Parental Experience of Unemployment and Children's Development Presented: Washington DC, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, March-April 2016 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: Population Association of America Keyword(s): Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Behavior, Antisocial; Children, Behavioral Development; Children, Mental Health; Depression (see also CESD); Parental Influences; Unemployment Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. I use the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and the NLSY79 Children and Young Adults Survey (CNLSY) together with a difference-in-difference and fixed-effects research design to investigate the impact of parental job loss and unemployment on children's developmental trajectories. I find that children who experience parental unemployment display higher levels of antisocial and anxious/depressed behavior and that that the magnitude and duration of these responses depend on the age of the child at the time of the employment separation. I find little evidence of a long-term impact on children's cognitive development, i.e. reading and math scores. The magnitude of the association between parental earnings and these outcomes is small and earnings measures fail to mediate the observed job-loss and unemployment effects; the home environment and family relationships appear to be the more likely mechanism. |
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Bibliography Citation
Wightman, Patrick. "Parental Experience of Unemployment and Children's Development." Presented: Washington DC, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, March-April 2016. |
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Wightman, Patrick |
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The Effect of Parental Job Loss on Children Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Chicago, 2009. Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Behavior Problems Index (BPI); CESD (Depression Scale); Depression (see also CESD); Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); Marital Satisfaction/Quality; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Rotter Scale (see Locus of Control); Self-Perception Profile for Children (SPPC); Temperament Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. 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. |
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Bibliography Citation
Wightman, Patrick. The Effect of Parental Job Loss on Children. Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Chicago, 2009.. |