Parental Job Loss and Children’s Health: Ten Years after the Massive Layoff of the SOEs’ Workers in China

Hong Liu and Zhong Zhao

No 5846, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Beginning in the mid 1990s, China sped up its urban labor market reform and drastically restructured its state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which resulted in massive layoff of the SOEs' workers and a high unemployment rate. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the parents’ job loss on the health of their children, using six waves of the China Health and Nutrition Survey covering the period from 1991 to 2006. We find that paternal job loss has a significant negative effect on children's health, whilst maternal job loss has no significant effect. The rationale behind the findings is that the income loss resulting from maternal job loss is much smaller; at the same time, the unemployed mothers are likely to increase the time they devote to care of their children, and this may alleviate the negative effect resulting from maternal job loss. Our findings are robust to various specifications.

Keywords: Grossman’s model; children’s health; China; job loss (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J13 J63 N35 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2011-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-hea, nep-lab and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Published - revised version published in: China Economic Review , 2014, 31, 303-319

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Journal Article: Parental job loss and children's health: Ten years after the massive layoff of the SOEs' workers in China (2014)
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