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Childhood homelessness and adult employment: the role of education, incarceration, and welfare receipt

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Abstract

This paper examines the long-run employment consequences of experiencing homelessness in childhood rather than later in life. We use novel panel data that link survey and administrative data for a sample of disadvantaged adults who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. Our estimation approach pays particular attention to the potential pathways linking childhood homelessness to adult employment. We find that those experiencing homelessness for the first time as children are less likely to be employed. For women, this relationship is largely explained by the lower educational attainment and higher welfare receipt (both in general and in the form of mental illness-related disability payments) of those experiencing childhood homelessness. Higher rates of high school incompletion and incarceration explain some of the link between childhood homelessness and men’s employment; however, childhood homelessness continues to have a substantial direct effect on male employment rates.

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Notes

  1. See Duncan et al. (2010) who make this point in the context of estimated income effects.

  2. For the broader literature on intergenerational mobility, refer to the following: Bowles and Gintis (2002), Erikson and Goldthorpe (2002), Solon (2002), Bjorklund et al. (2007), Ekhaugen (2009), Black and Devereux (2011), and Macmillan (2014).

  3. For example, the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study follows children until the age of nine (although field work is currently underway to extend the survey to when children are age 15). Other individual-level data are usually based on small and cross-sectional convenience samples.

  4. Australia performs well relative to other OECD countries with respect to measures of well-being. Average household net-adjusted disposable income per capita is $33,138 (USD) annually in comparison to an OECD average of $29,016 (USD). Australia also ranks above average on measures of wealth, health status, housing, jobs and earnings, education and skills, subjective well-being, and social connections (OECD 2014c).

  5. Including these 82 observations in the analysis does not substantively change the results.

  6. We do not impute missing covariates for those individuals with non-response items as most of our non-response results from respondents not answering the sexual maltreatment question. Unfortunately, we do know have sufficient childhood information to conduct an imputation process.

  7. The exact age range depends on the mediating variable of interest.

  8. Individuals who obtained a certificate I, II, III, or IV but did not complete the 12th grade are coded 0.

  9. Physical conditions include stroke, heart, or other circulatory conditions; diabetes; asthma; chronic bronchitis; cancer; liver problems; arthritis; epilepsy; kidney disease; hepatitis C; chronic neck or back problems; and acquired brain injury.

  10. Summary statistics for the variables in our analysis are reported by childhood homelessness in Appendix Table 6.

  11. To see this, substitute Eqs. 4 and 6 into Eq. 1.

  12. We use 399 replications and sample with replacement. Given our panel data, we ensure that our bootstrapped sample preserves the structure of initial sampling framework as of the first wave of Journeys Home data.

  13. Following Mundlak (1978), the second specification controls for the mean rate of homelessness (across all six waves) in adulthood, while specification 3 incorporates the means of all time-varying controls measured in adulthood.

  14. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians constitute a very small percentage of the total Australian population (3% as at 30 June 2011) (ABS, 2011). Indigenous Australians are markedly worse off than other Australians in terms of income, educational attainment, health, and life expectancy (Leigh and Gong 2009).

  15. These results are available upon request.

  16. Researchers have investigated the link between sexual victimization and the age at which young people first run away from home. While some find that sexual victimization is associated with running away earlier, others find the opposite. See Heerde et al. (2015) for a review.

  17. The relationship between the mediating factors and adult employment (α 3 from Eq. 1) is presented in Appendix Table 7.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn, Germany

    Deborah A. Cobb-Clark & Anna Zhu

  2. ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course, The University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia

    Deborah A. Cobb-Clark & Anna Zhu

  3. The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Deborah A. Cobb-Clark

  4. The Melbourne Institute of Applied Economics and Social Research, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Anna Zhu

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  1. Deborah A. Cobb-Clark
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  2. Anna Zhu
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Correspondence to Anna Zhu.

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This study was funded by Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP140102614).

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Responsible editor: Erdal Tekin

This research was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course (project number CE140100027). The Centre is administered by the Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Queensland with nodes at the University of Western Australia the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney. This paper also received financial support from an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP140102614) and from a University of Melbourne Early Career Research grant (502002). This paper uses data collected from the Journeys Home project a longitudinal survey-based study managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research on behalf of the Australian Government Department of Social Services (DSS). The paper benefited from the helpful comments and guidance of: the Editor, two anonymous referees, Melisa Bubonya, David Ribar, Joe Sabia, attendees of the 2015 Annual Meeting of the European Society of Population Economists, and seminar participants at the University of Bonn, Maastricht University, the University of Hamburg, and LISER (Luxembourg). The findings and views reported in this paper however are those solely of the authors.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 6 Descriptive statistics by childhood homelessness status
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Table 7 The direct association between education, incarceration and welfare receipt and the probability of being employed (α 3 from Eq. 1) by gender
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Cobb-Clark, D.A., Zhu, A. Childhood homelessness and adult employment: the role of education, incarceration, and welfare receipt. J Popul Econ 30, 893–924 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-017-0634-3

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