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 detrimental to the physical and mental health of children in low-socioeconomic status (SES) families, increasing their incidence of injuries and mental disorders. We separately find that maternal job loss leads to reductions in the incidence of infectious illness among children in high-SES families, possibly resulting from substitution of maternal care for market-based childcare services. Increases in public health insurance coverage compensate for a large share of the loss in private coverage that follows parental displacement, and we find no significant changes in routine or diagnostic medical care.

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 detrimental to the physical and mental health of children in low-socioeconomic status (SES) families, increasing their incidence of injuries and mental disorders. We separately find that maternal job loss leads to reductions in the incidence of infectious illness among children in high-SES families, possibly resulting from substitution of maternal care for market-based childcare services. Increases in public health insurance coverage compensate for a large share of the loss in private coverage that follows parental displacement, and we find no significant changes in routine or diagnostic medical care.

We analyze dynamic incentives in pension systems created by the use of a small set of final years of earnings to compute benefits. Using social security records and household surveys from Uruguay, we show that self-employed workers and some employees of small firms respond to these incentives by increasing reported earnings in the benefit calculation window. We find evidence that suggests that these responses are explained by changes in earnings reporting and not in total earnings or labor supply. Backof-the-envelope calculations indicate that this behavior increases the cost of pensions by about 0.2% of the GDP.

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