Do Dads matter? Or is it just their money that matters? Unpicking the effects of separation on educational outcomes by and

Ian Walker and Yu Zhu ()
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Ian Walker: University of Warwick and Institute for Fiscal Studies

No 200722, Working Papers from Geary Institute, University College Dublin

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.

Keywords: parental separation; parental incomes; early school leaving; educational attainment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 D31 J12 J13 J16 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-hap, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-ure
Date: 2007-06-12
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