The Economics of Grief

Gerard van den Berg, Petter Lundborg and Johan Vikström ()

No 7010, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study the short-run and long-run economic impact of one of the largest losses that an individual can face; the death of a child. We utilize unique merged registers on the entire Swedish population, combining information on the date and cause of death with parents' labor market outcomes, health outcomes, marital status, and subsequent fertility. We exploit the longitudinal dimension of the data and deal with a range of selection issues. We distinguish between effects on labor and various non-labor income components and we consider patterns over time. We find that labor market effects are persistent.

Keywords: sickness absenteeism; depression; child mortality; labor supply; bereavement; employment; marriage; death; divorce; mental health; fertility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C41 I11 I12 J12 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 59 pages
Date: 2012-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-dem, nep-hea, nep-his and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published in: Economic Journal, 2017, 127 (604), 1794 - 1832

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp7010.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Economics of Grief (2017)
Working Paper: The economics of grief (2012)
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:iza:izadps:dp7010

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().