The effects of family instability on children's outcomes

Rebecca Lessem and Carl Sanders
Additional contact information
Rebecca Lessem: Carnegie Mellon University
Carl Sanders: Washington University in St. Louis

No 1192, 2019 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: We study how family instability causally affects child outcomes, focusing on cognitive, physical, and emotional development. To do this, we develop and estimate a dynamic model of marriage and child development. The mother chooses both marital status (choosing between married, cohabiting, and single) and how much to invest in the child each period, and the child's outcomes evolve as a function of these decisions. One key component of the model is that marriage may create a more binding commitment to stay together, since both the monetary and psychological costs of divorce are likely higher than breakups of non-married couples. We estimate the model using data from Fragile families, a survey that starts with a sample of mothers and children, and follows them up to age 15. After estimating the model, we can use our results to quantify how much their outcomes would improve if there were policies put in place to encourage parents to stay together; for example, transfers that were tied to the couple remaining as joint parents, or changes to the legal treatment of cohabiting couples making it more costly to separate. These types of policies have a direct effect on the child if marital stability affects outcomes, and also potentially an indirect effect if the probability of divorce affects the mother's incentive to invest in the child.

Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2019/paper_1192.pdf (application/pdf)

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:red:sed019:1192

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2019 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().