Exposure to Plant Closure and Mental Health Effects on Parents, Partners, and Children

Jonathan Wörn , Norwegian Institute of Public Health

Losing a job has a negative impact on mental health, and it has been suggested that effects of job loss go beyond the directly affected person. This paper examines to what extent job loss affects the mental health of the partner and children of individuals who were exposed to job loss. Different from previous studies, this study is among the first to allow comparability of spillover effects on mental health for both partners and children by using the same data and methodology as for the directly affected person. This study further reduces issues of selection into job loss by exploiting more exogenous variation in employment status arising from exposure to plant closures. Not least, the study exploits doctor diagnoses of mental health problems and thereby circumvents some of the challenges of both self-report and hospitalization data used in other studies. The data used are Norwegian population registers about employment, income, family, and health care service usage. Individual fixed effects models are used to trace development in mental health in the years before, during, and after the plant closure. Preliminary results point towards an increase in consultations for mental health problems of directly affected individuals, and a reduction in income. While the mental health of partners seems to be barely affected, results are in line with spillover effects to children. Illustrating that employment changes in adults have implications for their children, these results have important implications for both employment and health policies.

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 Presented in Session 111. Labour Markets and Couples