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

Hong Liu and Zhong Zhao

China Economic Review, 2014, vol. 31, issue C, 303-319

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 parental job loss on their children's health, 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, while 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; meanwhile, the unemployed mothers are likely to increase their time inputs to child care, and this may alleviate the negative effect of maternal job loss. Our findings from a fixed effects model are robust to various specifications and alternative approaches.

Keywords: Children's health; Job loss; Grossman model; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J13 J63 N35 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

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Working Paper: Parental Job Loss and Children’s Health: Ten Years after the Massive Layoff of the SOEs’ Workers in China (2011) Downloads
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chieco:v:31:y:2014:i:c:p:303-319

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2014.10.007

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China Economic Review is currently edited by B.M. Fleisher, K. X. D. Huang, M.E. Lovely, Y. Wen, X. Zhang and X. Zhu

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