Adverse Life Events and Intergenerational Transfers

While there has been broad interest in the direct effects of major life events on older households that experience them, little attention has been paid to the intergenerational transmission of those effects— how negative shocks in parents’ households affect the outcomes of their adult children—or to the role that grown children play in helping their parents recover from adverse events. We use regression and event study approaches to examine within-family changes in monetary transfers and informal care following wealth loss, involuntary job displacement, spousal death, and health shocks in retirement-aged households. We find that giving to adult children is responsive to changes in parents’ wealth and earned income. We document large reductions in the likelihood of making financial transfers to children following wealth loss and job displacement, particularly in households with low accumulated wealth. We also find that parents increase their transfers following spousal death and reduce them with the onset of disability or poor health. We find that upstream transfers are also responsive to life events— children, particularly those with low-wealth parents, increase their financial transfers and in-kind assistance following adverse shocks in their parents’ households

Short-run Effects of Parental Job Loss on Children's Academic Achievement

We study the relationship between parental job loss and children’s academic achievement using data on job loss and grade retention from the 1996, 2001, and 2004 panels of 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.

Economic Conditions and Child Abuse

Although a huge literature spanning several disciplines documents an association between poverty and child abuse, researchers have not found persuasive evidence that economic downturns increase abuse, despite their impacts on family income. In this paper, we address this seeming contradiction. Using county-level child abuse data spanning 1996 to 2009 from the California Department of Justice, we estimate the extent to which a county's reported abuse rate diverges from its trend when its economic conditions diverge from trend, controlling for statewide annual shocks. The results of this analysis indicate that overall measures of economic conditions are not strongly related to rates of abuse. However, focusing on overall measures of economic conditions masks strong opposing effects of economic conditions facing males and females: male layoffs increase rates of abuse whereas female layoffs reduce rates of abuse. These results are consistent with a theoretical framework that builds on family-time-use models and emphasizes differential risks of abuse associated with a child's time spent with different caregivers

Does Hospital Electronic Medical Record Adoption Lead To Upcoding or More Accurate Coding?

Abstract This paper seeks to evaluate whether the adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) leads to upcoding for hospitalized Medicare patients, defined as categorizing a condition as more serious than justified in order to inflate bills, or more accurate coding. We use a triple difference: (1) between EMR and non-EMR hospitals; (2) before and after the 2007 Medicare payment reform, which made obtaining high payments harder; and (3) between medical and surgical admissions. For medical admissions, we find that the interaction of Medicare payment reform and EMR hospitals leads to higher codes, regardless of the financial incentive to upcode. For surgical admissions, we find no significant effect. While there is no evidence of upcoding, EMRs lead to higher billing by increasing the accuracy of coding for medical admissions

What Effects Do Macroeconomic Conditions Have on Families’ Time Together?

We examine family time together using data from the 2003-2010 American Time Use Survey combined with Bureau of Labor Statistics data on state-level unemployment rates. Couple time together is U-shaped; while fathers spend more time engaging in enriching childcare activities without a spouse present as the unemployment rate rises. Patterns are similar for dual-earner couples, but appear concentrated among demographic groups most affected by recessions. We also find that mothers are less likely to work standard hours and more likely to work on weekends as employment crises deepen, which is consistent with both sets of results for family time together

Local Economic Conditions, Employment Status, and the Intergenerational Transfer of Money and Time

This project will use panel data from the Health and Retirement Study to investigate the effects of involuntary job loss, health shocks, retirement, and local economic downturns on the intergenerational transfer of money and time within families. Among the goals of the project are (1) to gain an understanding of the potential for changes in intra-family transfers to mediate the effects of labor market shocks on individual consumption and (2) to learn whether intra-family transfers are a potential mechanism that might cause labor market shocks to have intergenerational effects

Short-Run Effects of Parental Job Loss on Child Health

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Short-Run Effects of Parental Job Loss on Child Health

Recent research suggests that parental job loss has negative effects on children's outcomes, including their academic achievement and long-run educational and labor market outcomes. In this paper we turn our attention to the effects of parental job loss on children's health. We combine health data from 16 waves of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, which allows us to use a fixed-effects specification and still have a large sample of parental job displacements. We find that paternal job loss is harmful to children's physical and mental health, particularly among children in low-socioeconomic status families. By contrast, we find that maternal job loss does not have detrimental effects on child health. Increases in public health insurance coverage compensate for close to half of the loss in private coverage that follows parental displacement, and we find no significant changes in medical-care utilization.US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Analysis (ASPE) - Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) [1H79AE000100-1]12 month embargo; published 01 January 2019This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]