IMDS-SBE Best paper award - Applied Microeconomics

Happy to announce that CLEAN fellows Diogo Britto, Caíque Melo, and Breno Sampaio have won the IMDS-SBE best paper award in the field of Applied Microeconomics during the 45th Meeting of the Brazilian Society of Econometrics. The paper is titled "The Kids Aren’t Alright: Parental Job Loss and Children’s Outcomes Within and Beyond Schools" and is currently submitted at the Review of Economic Studies. You can read about it here.

The paper studies the effects of parental job loss on children and how access to unemployment insurance can mitigate these impacts. Using unique administrative data from Brazil and leveraging mass layoffs for identification, the authors show that parental job loss increases school dropouts and age-grade distortion by up to 1.5 percentage points in six years. They further document increases in teenage work, crime, and early pregnancy, and reductions in parental educational investments after layoff. Using a regression discontinuity design, the paper provides novel evidence that access to unemployment insurance (UI) mitigates some of the intergenerational impacts of job loss. A back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that intergenerational UI effects may be quantitatively relevant for welfare analyses. Overall, the findings suggest that families engage in costly insurance measures that negatively affect children in order to deal with the income shock brought by job loss; and that psychological factors may also play a role.