What childhood characteristics predict psychological resilience to economic shocks in adulthood?

Nattavudh Powdthavee

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2014, vol. 45, issue C, 84-101

Abstract: This paper investigates whether people’s psychological resilience to one of the most important economic shocks – job loss – can be predicted using early childhood characteristics. Using a longitudinal data that tracked almost 3000 children into adulthood, we showed that the negative effect of unemployment on mental well-being and life satisfaction is significantly larger for workers who, as adolescents, had a relatively poor father-child relationship. Maternal unemployment, on the other hand, is a good predictor of how individuals react psychologically to future unemployment. Although the results should be viewed as illustrative and more research is needed, the current article provides new longitudinal evidence that psychological resilience to job loss may be determined early on in the life cycle.

Keywords: Resilience; Happiness; Unemployment; Childhood; BHPS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D03 I19 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487014000713
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:45:y:2014:i:c:p:84-101

DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2014.08.003

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read

More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().