Abstract
The widely held view that separation has adverse effects on children has been the basis of important policy interventions. While a small number of analyses have been concerned with selection into divorce, no studies have attempted to separate out the effects of one parent (mostly the father) leaving, from the effects of that parent’s money leaving, on the outcomes for the child. This paper is concerned with early school leaving and educational attainment and their relationship to parental separation and parental incomes. While we find that parental separation has strong effects on these outcomes, this result seems not to be robust to adding additional control variables. In particular, we find that when we include income our results then indicate that father’s departure appears to be unimportant for early school leaving and academic achievement, while income is significant. This suggests that income may have been an important unobservable, that is correlated with separation and the outcome variables, in earlier research. Indeed, this finding also seems to be true in our instrumental variables analysis – although the effect of income is slightly weakened.
JEL Code D13 • D31 • J12 • J13 • J16 • J22
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Notes
- 1.
See Amato and Keith (1991) who concluded that children with divorced parents, compared with children with continuously married parents, score significantly lower on measures of academic achievement, conduct, psychological adjustment, self-concept and social relations. Amato (2001) updated this analysis. Haveman and Wolfe (1995) identify divorce as a major contributing factor in their review of the determinants of child outcomes.
- 2.
In the UK attempts to implement compulsory mediation have not been successful. Mediation was a key element of the Family Law Act of 1996 and pilot project results showed that only 7% had attended voluntary mediation. In those pilot areas where mediation was compulsory, there was widespread use of exceptions granted to people fearing violence from former spouses.
- 3.
See Feenberg and Rosen (1995).
- 4.
- 5.
See Dahl and Lochner (2005) for example.
- 6.
Amato (2005) speculates as to why child outcomes are affected by separation.
- 7.
In Walker and Zhu (2006a) we show that CS is an important disincentive to separate. Most parental separations are instigated by mothers and we interpret the lower rates of separation associated with higher levels of CS as better behaviour by fathers within marriage to reduce the probability of being ejected from the household.
- 8.
See Booth and Kee (2009) for evidence that supports an effect of birth order on income.
- 9.
See, for example, Kiernan (2004).
- 10.
- 11.
Note that new work on MTO by Sanbonmatsu et al. (2006) suggests that MTO-driven neighbourhood effects on academic achievement were not significant.
- 12.
- 13.
See, for a recent example, Francesconi et al. (2005).
- 14.
Families headed by custodial fathers constitute only a very small proportion of all non-intact families (less than 5%), and hence are dropped out of our sample.
- 15.
See Rhum (2004) who uses this idea in the context of the effects of maternal care.
- 16.
We match on the residual to insulate ourselves from the potential effect of the long run level of GHQ on the outcomes for the children.
- 17.
Note that there is high correlation between early school leaving intentions and actual GCSE passes (the correlation coefficient in a bivariate probit model is estimated to be around −0.6). For those who intended to leave at 16, just over 10% managed to achieve the five good pass grades in their GCSE’s taken at age 15 or 16, comparing to nearly 60% for those who intended to stay on.
- 18.
See Lundberg (2005).
- 19.
Here we have excluded the 115 mothers who have repartnered because of their small sample size. Our attempts to endogenise mother’s education suggested that this made no difference to our estimates and we report only estimates where this is assumed to be exogenous.
- 20.
We also use an extended specification which includes additionally nineteen wave 1 characteristics: cohabiting, number of former marriages, age relationship started, log duration of relationship spell, same race, same religion, partner non-religious, youngest child under 5, number of dependent children, parents with different education levels, five dummies for age differences between parents, mother in employment, mother unemployed, father in employment, father unemployed.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the Nuffield Foundation and ESRC’s Evidence Based Policy Network grant to the Institute for Fiscal Studies for co-funding this research. Andrew Oswald, Paul Devereux and Martin Browning have provided helpful comments and suggestion. The data was provided by the Economic and Social Research Council’s Data-Archive at the University of Essex and is used with permission. The usual disclaimer applies.
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Walker, I., Zhu, Y. (2011). Do Dads Matter? Or Is It Just Their Money that Matters? Unpicking the Effects of Separation on Educational Outcomes. In: Molina, J. (eds) Household Economic Behaviors. International Series on Consumer Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9431-8_7
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