Parental unemployment and children's education: A note on the very small role of aspirations

Gabriele Mari

No xzs8r, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Children exposed to parental unemployment have been found to lag behind in school, but research has struggled to pin down the underlying explanation. One hypothesis is that parental unemployment may dampen children’s aspirations to do well and go far in school. Yet, few studies on parental unemployment have relied on actual measures of children’s aspirations or devised a formal analysis of this mechanism. Using longitudinal data from the UK (N =1,277), I investigate the role of educational aspirations in GCSE attainment. I compare adolescents exposed to parental unemployment before or only after the typical age at which GCSE exams are taken. In adjusted models, children exposed to parental unemployment before their GCSEs are around 7 percentage points less likely to attain the qualification by age 17. On average, children have high educational aspirations, although intentions to enrol in college or university are relatively lower after an early spell of parental unemployment. Nevertheless, a hypothetical intervention setting aspirations to the same level for all children is found to eliminate, in a best-case scenario, a negligible fraction of the educational penalty faced by children exposed to parental unemployment. This note thus seeks to stimulate more research on the mechanisms underpinning the intergenerational effects of unemployment. Findings cast doubts on the idea that children’s aspirations, the target of much policy discourse and intervention, are a crucial part of the equation.

Date: 2022-10-14
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/6345724c31d6531a1f2dc803/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:xzs8r

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/xzs8r

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().