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Intergenerational Scars: The Impact of Parental Unemployment on Individual Health Later in Life

Michele Ubaldi & Matteo Picchio

German Economic Review2025https://doi.org/10.1515/ger-2024-0058article
AJG 2ABDC B
Weight
0.37

Abstract

This paper studies whether individuals that experienced parental unemployment during their childhood/early adolescence have poorer health once they reach the adulthood. We used data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 2002 until 2018. Our identification strategy of the causal effect of parental unemployment relied on plant closures as exogenous variation of the individual labor market condition. We combined matching methods and parametric estimation to strengthen the causal interpretation of the estimates. On the one hand, we found a nil effect for parental unemployment on mental health. On the other hand, we detected a negative effect on physical health, which is stronger if parental unemployment occurred in late periods of the childhood and heterogeneous across gender. The negative effect of parental unemployment on physical health may be explained by a higher alcohol and tobacco consumption later in life.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1515/ger-2024-0058

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@article{michele2025,
  title        = {{Intergenerational Scars: The Impact of Parental Unemployment on Individual Health Later in Life}},
  author       = {Michele Ubaldi & Matteo Picchio},
  journal      = {German Economic Review},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1515/ger-2024-0058},
}

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Evidence weight

0.37

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.16 × 0.4 = 0.06
M · momentum0.53 × 0.15 = 0.08
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.