Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/331950 
Year of Publication: 
2025
Citation: 
[Journal:] German Economic Review (GER) [ISSN:] 1468-0475 [Volume:] 26 [Issue:] 1 [Year:] 2025 [Pages:] 35-70
Publisher: 
De Gruyter, Berlin
Abstract: 
This paper studies whether individuals that experienced parental unemployment during their childhood/early adolescence have poorer health once they reach the adulthood. We used data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 2002 until 2018. Our identification strategy of the causal effect of parental unemployment relied on plant closures as exogenous variation of the individual labor market condition. We combined matching methods and parametric estimation to strengthen the causal interpretation of the estimates. On the one hand, we found a nil effect for parental unemployment on mental health. On the other hand, we detected a negative effect on physical health, which is stronger if parental unemployment occurred in late periods of the childhood and heterogeneous across gender. The negative effect of parental unemployment on physical health may be explained by a higher alcohol and tobacco consumption later in life.
Subjects: 
health behavior
mental health
parental unemployment
physical health
plant closure
JEL: 
I10
J62
J65
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article

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