When parents are faced with unemployment just before pregnancy, how does this affect their child’s future? Many young parents are concerned about the health of their infant at birth. Health at birth has indeed been shown to affect later life outcomes, such as school grades, employment opportunities, and earnings. However, do parents have to worry about detrimental health effects from unemployment just before a pregnancy?
Researchers Björn Högberg, Anna Baranowska-Rataj, and Jonas Voßemer found that there was surprisingly little evidence on whether parental unemployment causes poorer infant health. With their recent study, they have filled this research gap.
Their analyses employ register data from Sweden, including 1.5 million siblings born between 1996 and 2017. Since there are many factors that may raise the risk of parental unemployment and simultaneously worsen infant health, this study adopts a sibling comparison design. This means that siblings in a family whose birth happened around the time of parental unemployment, are compared to siblings within the same family who were born when their parents were employed. This approach helps accounting for unmeasured confounding at the level of families.
Högberg, Baranowska-Rataj and Voßemer find that the effects of maternal unemployment on poor infant health are small and not consistently significant. They found no effects at all from paternal unemployment. Furthermore, detailed analyses across different measures of pre-existing social disadvantages, such as low education, migration background, and dual parental unemployment, revealed that the effects of parental unemployment are weak even when more vulnerable population subgroups are examined.
This study also employed sensitivity analyses in order to check for a sample selection bias. Such a bias may occur if parents whose children could be potentially affected by unemployment postpone childbearing. Even when this mechanism is taken into account with novel econometric methods, the main conclusions about the limited negative effects of parental unemployment still hold. The authors stress, however, that they had situated their findings in the context of a relatively generous and egalitarian Swedish welfare state, which protects families against the effects of negative economic shocks.