A Mighty Toll

Abstract

This paper estimates the causal effects of parental loss on a child’s adulthood economic well-being by leveraging digitized records of nearly all early 20th-century U.S. mining accidents. I compare the outcomes of sons of fatal mining accident victims to those with fathers experiencing serious non-fatal accidents. Adult sons who lost their fathers when they were young experienced an 18 percent loss of income and had worse labor market outcomes. Examining families following the accident shows that widowed mothers were substantially more likely to take on the role of sole head of household and enter the labor market.