Chapter 1, titled “The Impact of Parental Job Loss on Children’s Health”, utilises data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey in order to explore the extent to which the negative consequences of job loss of the household head extend to the health of the children in the family. We employ a linear model to study various health outcomes, and our estimation results indicate that children’s health responds differently to female and male household head’s unemployment. In particular, we find support for an adverse effect of father’s unemployment on the development of chronic conditions in children and occurrence of depression, but a beneficial effect of single mother’s unemployment on the kid’s mental health. The paper also provides evidence of a detrimental impact of paternal job loss on the probability the kid has low height for age, while there is no corresponding impact of mother’s job loss. Finally, this study indicates the possibility that children of unemployed parents are under-diagnosed in terms of chronic conditions. The latter has potential policy implications, pointing towards the need to make children health care and regular check-ups more broadly available. Chapter 2 is titled “The Effect of Retirement on Mental Health and Social Inclusion of the Elderly”. This Chapter utilises multinational data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to investigate the effect of retirement of the elderly on their psychological well-being and social inclusion. We use an instrumental variable strategy based on plausibly exogenous variation in retirement probabilities induced by the country-level statutory and early retirement ages. The key findings of the study tell a consistent story: while labour force exit has no significant impact on the mental health of male workers, it has a beneficial effect on women’s mental health. The results also suggest a heterogeneous effect of retirement on the social connectedness of the elderly: exiting the labour force decreases the size of social networks for men but not for women; additionally, retirement enhances females’ contacts with parents, but has no effect for male retirees. This heterogeneity of the retirement effect has important policy implications, as it points out the possibility that the trends in the European Union towards increasing the pensionable ages could lead to a loss of welfare for women.The last Chapter uses data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies to re-examine the immigrant-non-immigrant earnings gap. We exploit the availability of cognitive skills measures in the data, such as numeracy and literacy scores, allowing us to minimize the presence of unobserved effects. Our analysis employs a modified Mincer earnings function and Oaxaca-Blinder mean log-wage decomposition (Oaxaca (1973) and Blinder (1973)); we also make use of the decomposition technique by DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux (1996) to examine the earnings gap across the entire earnings distribution. We find that immigrants have lower returns to education than native workers, yet higher returns to literacy proficiency, which is conforming to the statistical discrimination literature. The Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition results imply that a log-wage model specified without cognitive skill measures would overestimate the unexplained part of the mean immigrant-non-immigrant gap nearly twice, while including numeracy and literacy test scores reveals lower role for discrimination. Lastly, the DiNardo-Fortin-Lemieux decomposition suggests that numeracy and literacy test scores matter almost equally throughout the entire log-wage distribution but cannot fully explain the observed immigrant-native gap, except for the bottom and the top decile.
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