Peer-reviewed article
Parental unemployment, social insurance and child well-being across countries
Kerstin F. Hansen, Alois Stutzer ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study examines how parental unemployment affects children's life satisfaction across multiple countries in Europe, the Middle East and North America. The research finds that when parents are unemployed, children report lower life satisfaction, but this negative effect is reduced when countries have more generous unemployment benefits. The protective effect of unemployment insurance was stronger for fathers' unemployment than mothers' unemployment, and varied depending on social and cultural norms around work.
Key points
- Parental unemployment is strongly negatively associated with children's life satisfaction across all countries studied
- Higher unemployment benefit replacement rates reduce the negative effect of paternal unemployment on children's well-being
- Unemployment benefits do not significantly buffer the negative effects of maternal unemployment on children's life satisfaction
- The protective effect of unemployment insurance is more pronounced in countries with stricter social work norms
- The study used repeated cross-sectional data from school-aged children across multiple countries and years
Limitations
The study is cross-sectional or repeated cross-sectional in design, so it cannot establish causation or account for confounding factors that might explain both parental unemployment and reduced child well-being. The analysis does not examine specific mechanisms through which parental unemployment affects children or explore differences across child age groups or family structures.
Abstract
Based on a unique repeated cross-sectional data set of school-aged children in Europe, the Middle East and North America, we analyze how children’s subjective well-being is related to parents’ employment status, depending on the institutional context. We find that parental unemployment is strongly negatively related to children’s life satisfaction across countries and years. The effect is thereby moderated by the generosity of unemployment benefits. Exploiting across- and within-country variation, our results suggest that a higher benefit replacement rate, on average, alleviates the negative effects of fathers’, but not mothers’, unemployment. We further test the robustness of our results considering unemployment benefits jointly with social work norms. While the buffering effect of unemployment insurance remains, the spillover effects of paternal unemployment seem to be more pronounced in environments with stricter social work norms.