The Impact of Unexpected Maternal Death on Education: First Evidence from Three National dministrative Data Links

摘要

This paper uses a large administrative data-set from Taiwan to estimate the impact of the unexpected death of a parent on children's college enrollment. Our fixed-effects estimates show that the loss of a mother has a much larger impact on college enrollment than the loss of a father, especially when the parent's death is unexpected. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that the impact of paternal death is small and insignificant, regardless of how it occurred, contrary to the results of cross-sectional estimates.