Parental Cancer Diagnosis and Children’s Educational Outcomes

Claudia Reiter , Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS) Vienna; Vienna Institute of Demography, Austrian Academy of Sciences

This study examines how serious parental illness affects children’s educational and early labor-market trajectories, using population-wide administrative data from Austria. When a parent develops cancer, families face both economic and psychosocial stress that may disrupt children’s schooling and long-term human capital formation. While most previous research focuses on the consequences of parental death, less is known about the effects of non-fatal but severe illnesses that allow for adaptation over time. The analysis draws on newly linked Austrian administrative registers covering all students from the 2006/07 to the 2022/23 school year (approximately 1.4 million individuals), matched to parental employment, income, and health records, including precise dates and types of cancer diagnoses. These longitudinal data enable the reconstruction of complete educational trajectories from primary school entry through upper-secondary completion and into early adulthood. Exploiting the quasi-random timing of parental cancer diagnoses, we estimate event-study models with child fixed effects to identify deviations from pre-diagnosis trajectories, complemented by timing-alignment models and within-family comparisons between siblings who were differently exposed at the time of diagnosis. Outcomes include school progression, track changes, completion, transitions to higher education, and early labor-market outcomes such as employment, NEET status, and earnings. The study provides new evidence on how major family health shocks shape educational and labor-market trajectories, contributing to demographic research on life-course inequality and intergenerational transmission. Findings will help identify educational stages and family contexts where targeted interventions can mitigate the long-term social and economic consequences of parental illness.

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 Presented in Session 82. Linked lives: Sibling Contexts and the Life Course