Health of Elderly Parents, Their Children's Labor Supply, and the Role of Migrant Care Workers

A hard pill to swallow? Parental health shocks and children's mental health

“…1 Severe health impairments of parents can effect children even if the parents do not die from the disease. There is evidence that non-fatal parental health shocks negatively affect children's education (Alam, 2015;Bratti & Mendola, 2014;Kristiansen, 2021;Luca & Bloom, 2018) and adult children's labor market performance (Frimmel et al, 2020). 2 In the context of health behavior, Fadlon and Nielsen (2019) find that adult children in Denmark increase their use of preventive health measures following parental health shocks.…”

“…Rellstab et al (2020) use survey data to provide suggestive evidence of a negative but economically insignificant effect of parental health shocks on adult children's mental health. 3 Only a few studies identify a causal effect of parental health shocks on children's mental health (Bockerman et al, 2021;Frimmel et al, 2020;Kristiansen, 2021). In an event study design, Kristiansen uses administrative data that cover all Danish children between 14 and 18 years old.…”

“…The research closest to our work is Frimmel et al (2020). Their study focuses on the effects of elderly parent's health on their children's labor supply.…”

“…Second, based on a credible identification strategy and using high-quality administrative health register data from Austria, we analyze young children aged 2-18 years (in the shock year). In doing so, we abstract from the caregiving effect (Bom et al, 2019;Heger, 2017) and at the same time distinguish ourselves from Frimmel et al (2020), who analyze adult children.…”

“…It has 1.505 million inhabitants representing 16.8% of the population. Per capita health care expenditures in 2017 were 4012 €, which was 6.5% below the Austrian average of 4291 €(Hofmarcher & Singhuber, 2019).7 The available outpatient health care data do not include medical diagnoses.8 In Section 4.3, we provide a robustness analysis at the intensive margin where we estimate health care expenditures (in €) for all outcomes.9 Numerous studies have exploited the timing of an event to identify causal effects of fatal or non-fatal health shocks(Alam, 2015;Bockerman et al, 2021;Bratti & Mendola, 2014;Druedahl & Martinello, 2021;Fadlon & Nielsen, 2019;Frimmel et al, 2020;García-Miralles & Gensowski, 2020;Kristiansen, 2021;Le & Nguyen, 2017;Mühlenweg et al, 2016;Norén, 2020;Rellstab et al, 2020), job displacements(Ahammer et al, 2020;Halla et al, 2020;Jacobson et al, 1993;Ruhm, 1991), family disruption(Persson & Rossin-Slater, 2018), or closing of administrative social security units(Deshpande & Li, 2019).10 The descriptives for parents in the treatment and control group are presented in Appendix TableA1. Appendix TableA2includes the full estimation output for parental outcomes.11 Full estimation output is presented in TableB1in Appendix B.12 In TableB2, we show the dynamic effects of parental health shocks on children's use of other medications.…”