Impacts of Childhood Disability on Family : Labor, Marriage, Fertility, and Depression

Childhood disability has enormous impacts on family members. Limited by data, previous literature faces challenges in measurement and identification and focuses primarily on maternal labor outcomes. Using administrative records from the National Health Insurance Research Database from Taiwan, we study one of the most prevalent causes of childhood disability -- cerebral palsy (CP). We exploit its unexpected nature and our rich data to investigate a wide variety of impacts on family members. We examine 12,228 children diagnosed with CP and their families from 2000 to 2019. We take an event study approach to study various outcomes, including parents' labor supply, mental health, marital status, and fertility. We find that having a CP child decreases the mother's probability of work by 5.5 pp, and it increases divorce by 2.1 pp and depression by 25%. We also find a significant decrease in long-run fertility. These effects are larger for parents with worse socioeconomic conditions and for CP daughters