Essays on Parental Labor Market Characteristics and the Academic Outcomes of their Offspring

This thesis examines the impact of parental job loss and parental job insecurity on several academic outcomes of their offspring. Recent evidence has shown that parental job loss negatively influences the school performance of their offspring. Chapter 2 uses an original dataset I collected myself (described in Chapter 1) to study the effect of parental job loss on children’s school performance during the Great Recession in Spain. Conditioning on student fixed effects and observed covariates, the Great Recession generates variation in job loss that could be considered analogous to that provided by randomisation. The results show that after father’s job loss, students experience a negative and significant decrease on average grades of about 13 to 19 % of a standard deviation. This effect remains unaltered once the impact of mother’s job loss on grades is accounted for. Interestingly, maternal job loss has no significant effect on the school performance of her offspring. Moreover, school performance prior to father’s job loss is not affected by future job losses, reinforcing the causal interpretation of the link between father’s job loss and children’s educational outcomes. Finally, the impact of paternal job loss is not homogeneous across students, but it is rathe