Birth Outcomes in Spain during and after The Great Recession: The Protective Role of Maternal Education in Contexts of High Unemployment

Marta Seiz , Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
Leire Salazar, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED)
Tatiana Eremenko, UNED, Spain

Perinatal health is one of the best infant health indicators and a relevant correlate of later life chances. It is not evenly distributed in the population – higher maternal resources are associated with superior birth outcomes. In Spain, despite changes in demographic trends, related socioeconomic gaps have been persistent over the past decades. We examine the influence of the rise in unemployment during the Great Recession starting in 2008 on these gaps in perinatal health. Additionally, we investigate the potentially protective effect of maternal education. Earlier work found babies born during recessive periods in Spain to display better outcomes due to selection into fertility of married and older parents (Aparicio et al. 2020). We contribute to this line of research by focusing on maternal education as main indicator of socioeconomic resources. We analyze whether educational selection into fertility took place during the Great Recession, its influence on perinatal health, and its potentially mitigating effect on the impact of an adverse macroeconomic environment. We use register data on the universe of live births between 2007 and 2019 combined with data on province-level unemployment. Findings from fixed and random effects models confirm selection into fertility of mothers with university- and secondary-level education in times of high unemployment; a protective influence of maternal education on perinatal health; and a heterogeneous influence of unemployment increases on different birth outcomes. Maternal education does not play a prominent role as mediator of these relations, yet it does offer consistent protection against adverse results regardless of unemployment rates.

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 Presented in Session 52. Education and Health