Social Security Schemes, Economic Crisis, and Child Education: An Empirical Study During the <scp>COVID</scp> ‐19 Pandemic in Thailand

ABSTRACT This study first examined the function of social security schemes in moderating the adverse effects on child education of unemployment among household members. Using data from the 2019 non‐crisis period and the 2021 crisis period from the Thailand Socio‐Economic Survey, two‐step estimation models were employed due to the presence of a large number of censored observations. In addition, the validity of the results was supported by utilizing an instrumental variable approach to address the possibility of an endogeneity problem. Of greater importance, the negative effects of unemployment were moderated when unemployed household members were covered by social security schemes. The results show that the negative impact of unemployment on educational spending was significantly larger during the 2021 crisis period compared to the 2019 non‐crisis period. To further verify the mitigating role of SSS, the robustness of the results was also checked by including an interaction term between unemployment and SSS in two‐stage decision models, along with additional control variables.