Local Labor Market Shocks And Family Outcomes

While the most often-cited impacts of negative shocks to local labor market shocks are those to individuals' earnings and employment status, the repercussions of economic recession extend beyond these direct labor market effects. My dissertation research explores the effects of local labor market shocks and job displacement on families. Together, the three chapters of my dissertation contribute a better understanding of the overall welfare impacts of business cycle fluctuations. Chapter 1 examines the effect of local labor markets on fertility. To identify exogenous variation in male and female labor demand, I create indices that exploit cross-sectional variation in industry composition, changes in gender-composition within industries, and growth in national industry employment. Consistent with economic theory, I find that improvements in men's labor market conditions are associated with increases in fertility while improvements in women's labor market conditions have the opposite effect. I separately find that increases in unemployment rates are associated with small significant decreases in birth rates. In Chapter 2, I study the effect of business cycles on marriage and divorce rates. I find that increased unemployment is associated with small but significant reductions in both marriages and divorces. The results are robust to replacing general unemployment rates with alternative measures of state economic health, hold for both blacks and whites, and are concentrated among working-aged individuals. Timing analysis suggests that the effect of a shock to the unemployment rate on marriage rates is permanent, while the effect on divorce rates is temporary. In Chapter 3, Ann Stevens and I study the relationship between parental job loss and children's academic achievement using data on job loss and grade retention from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. We find that a parental job loss increases the probability of children's grade retention by 0.8 percentage points, or around 15 percent. After conditioning on child fixed effects, there is no evidence of significantly increased grade retention prior to the job loss, suggesting a causal link between the parental employment shock and children's academic difficulties. These effects are concentrated among children whose parents have a high school education or less.