The effect of parental job loss on youth transition to employment in Turkey

Abstract

This article analyses the impact of household head's involuntary job loss on young person's (15–24 years old) likelihood to transition from non-employment to employment. We construct twelve two-year pseudo-panels based on previous year's labour market outcomes using Turkish Household Labor Force Surveys (THLFS) from 2005 to 2016 and then pool the twelve pseudo-panels for analysis. We examine youth's labour market responses according to education levels and gender. We show that a female with at least a high school degree is about 8.7 percentage points more likely to transition to from non-employment to employment in the group where the head experienced an unexpected job loss than a female in the group where the head remained employed. Furthermore, for females, the probability of transitioning to employment increases by education level. For males, although we find positive and statistically significant effect of head's job loss on the transition probability, we do not find any differences according to education level.