| 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. |