EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Long-Term Impact of Children's Disabilities on Families

Snaebjorn Gunnsteinsson () and Herdis Steingrimsdottir

No 6-2019, Working Papers from Copenhagen Business School, Department of Economics

Abstract: Childhood disability is a major health shock that affects parents early in their working life. We estimate its impact on parents’ career trajectories, their balance sheets, and major life decisions using detailed register data from Denmark. To identify the causal effect of childhood disability we use an event study approach, where we control for a rich set of pre-birth variables and focus on conditions that have no or weak associations with socioeconomic determinants. We find that having a child with a disability has strong negative impact on mothers’ earnings. The effect is persistent and the wage penalty appears to grow over time. Fathers’ earnings are also affected but the impact is notably smaller. We find that both parents are less likely to be employed in the long run and are less likely to ascend to top executive positions. The long-term structure of the household is also affected as subsequent fertility is lower and partnership dissolution is more common. Finally, despite this financial shock, long term net worth of families is not affected or may be positively affected, potentially due to help from government transfers and lower cost associated with having fewer other children, or due to a stronger savings motive for the long term care of the disabled child.

Keywords: disability; children; child; insurance; earnings; income; labor force participation; fertility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 I14 J13 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2019-06-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-lma and nep-mac
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9745 Full text (application/pdf)
Full text not avaiable

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:hhs:cbsnow:2019_006

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Copenhagen Business School, Department of Economics Copenhagen Business School, Department of Economics, Porcelaenshaven 16 A. 1.floor, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CBS Library Research Registration Team ().

 
Page updated 2025-02-10
Handle: RePEc:hhs:cbsnow:2019_006