Life After Sudden Partner Loss: Health and Economic Consequences for Sole Parents in New Zealand

Abstract

Sudden partner death in mid-life is a major shock with potential long-term consequences for survivors’ health and economic well-being, especially for those who raise children. However, most bereavement research has focused on older widowed spouses, leaving a gap in assessing its influence on younger families. This research investigates the long-term physical health, mental health, and economic effects of partner loss on surviving parents in New Zealand. Using integrated administrative microdata from Statistics New Zealand’s Integrated Data Infrastructure, 312 surviving fathers and 1,380 surviving mothers (ages 18–54 with dependent children) are identified whose partners died of exogenous causes between 2006 and 2019. The difference-in-differences model developed by Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021) is employed to estimate average treatment effects on several life outcomes: annual wages and salaries, benefit uptake, ACC compensation, and prescription medication use (with medications classified into cardiovascular and mental health categories, e.g., antidepressants, anxiolytics, sedatives). Mortality records from the Ministry of Health are conditioned on ICD-10 codes to ensure the deaths are sudden and exogenous, and parental characteristics and pre-loss incomes are drawn from an administrative census and Internal Revenue Data.

The findings reveal a sharp and persistent decline in earnings for surviving parents, with fathers experiencing a larger and more prolonged income loss. Benefit receipt rises sharply following partner loss for surviving fathers and remains elevated for many years; mothers see a brief increase immediately after loss, but their reliance on benefits subsides in later years. ACC uptake increases notably in the post-loss years for both mothers and fathers. Prescription medication use rises across both mental and cardiovascular health domains, with the largest sustained increases observed among mothers (especially in sedative and antidepressant prescriptions). These results demonstrate that the death of a partner imposes a multifaceted and enduring socioeconomic and health burden on surviving parents.