Childhood Homelessness and Adult Employment: The Role of Education, Incarceration, and Welfare Receipt

Deborah Cobb-Clark and Anna Zhu ()
Additional contact information
Anna Zhu: RMIT University

No 9250, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper analyzes the long-term consequences of children experiencing homelessness. Our primary goal is to assess the importance of the potential pathways linking childhood homelessness to adult employment. We use novel panel data that link survey and administrative data for a sample of disadvantaged adults who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. We find that those experiencing homelessness for the first time as children are less likely to be employed than those who were never homeless as a child. For women, this relationship is largely explained by the lower educational attainment and higher welfare receipt (both in general and in the form of mental illness-related disability payments) of those experiencing childhood homelessness. Higher rates of high-school incompletion and incarceration explain some of the link between childhood homelessness and men's employment, however, childhood homelessness continues to have a substantial direct effect on male employment rates.

Keywords: education; welfare receipt; homelessness; employment; incarceration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I2 J1 J2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2015-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-edu, nep-ger and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Journal of Population Economics, 2017, 30 (3), 893-924

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Related works:
Journal Article: Childhood homelessness and adult employment: the role of education, incarceration, and welfare receipt (2017)
Working Paper: Childhood Homelessness and Adult Employment: The Role of Education, Incarceration, and Welfare Receipt (2015)
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