Parental Loss and Children’s Well-Being

Abstract

This paper identifies the effects of parental death on children’s well-being using six administrative data sets from Taiwan. Information collected at different points in children’s lives and detailed parental mortality records are used to show that parental death has significant long-term implications for human capital accumulation: the quality of education of high income children is significantly reduced; the impact of a father’s death on his son’s probability of acquiring higher education increases with income; children are more likely to substitute an income earning occupation in place of higher education; low-income girls are also more likely to marry during their teenage years.