The Impacts of Children's Disability on Mothers' Labor Supply and Marital Status

Download or read book The Impacts of Children's Disability on Mothers' Labor Supply and Marital Status written by Peihong Feng and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: The first essay explores the differential impacts of child disability on maternal labor supply due to both episodic conditions such as asthma and other health limitations that do not have episodic symptomology. This is the first study that child disabilities are broken down into asthma and non-asthma types and episodic versus non-episodic types of health limitations. Using panel data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), the differential impacts of child disability on maternal working hours are estimated using Wooldridge's (1995) method. The empirical results show that single mothers do not experience decreased working hours when they have a child with a health condition other than asthma, but their annual working hours decrease by 165 hours when there is an asthmatic child in the household. The second essay examines the effects of a disabled child on the mother's marital durations. This study provides a complete picture on how child disability affects different types of marital durations. This study also investigates multiple married or unmarried spells to obtain more insight of how a child in poor health affects the mother's marital status in the long term, beyond the first marriage and the first divorce. Using data from NLSY79, the duration model accounting for unobserved heterogeneity is used. The results show that a single mother with a disabled child has a significantly lower likelihood of starting a new marriage than her counterparts. Simulations show that child disability deters divorced and never-married mothers from a (re)marriage by an average of 15 months or 14 months, respectively, compared to the situation when the child is in good health. However, the results do not show any evidence that a disabled child has a disruptive effect on the parents' existing marriage.