父母親失業對新生兒體重的影響

EFFECTS OF PARENTAL JOB LOSS AND CHILDREN’S HEALTH: EVIDENCE FROM TAIWAN’S ADMINISTRATIVE DATA

父親或母親失業是家庭資源的重大衝擊，不僅影響小孩的人力資本投資，也可能會對小孩的健康造成影響。本研究主要是在探討父親或母親經歷失業衝擊後，對於新生兒出生體重的影響。我們所採用的樣本係來自於台灣四套合併的行政資料，包含出生檔、勞保檔、失業保險給付檔以及公司關廠檔。透過這些豐富的資料，我們利用「因公司關廠」對員工外生性衝擊作為父母失業的指標；另外，我們以母親固定效果來控制家庭中「不可觀察到」的因素，藉以解決失業變數的內生性問題。研究結果發現，父親失業對小孩出生體重並無顯著的影響，但母親失業對小孩出生體重則有微小但顯著的正向影響。

This paper investigates the impact of parental job loss on a child’s birth weight, using unusual data by linking several administrative data sets from Taiwan. Taking advantage of the detailed information on job status and fertility histories in this data, we employ two strategies to capture the causal effect of parental job loss on birth weight: first, we identify parental job loss as involuntary displacement due to plant closures; second, we propose the mother fixed-effects model to control for all time-invariant unobservable family background. Our findings suggest that a mother’s job loss has a significantly positive effect on a child’s birth weight. However, a father’s job loss does not matter.