Is the Best Interest of the Child Best for Children? Educational Attainment and Child Custody Assignment

Yang Chen and Trevon Logan

Southern Economic Journal, 2020, vol. 86, issue 3, 1041-1080

Abstract: Between the 1970s and 1990s, state custody laws moved from maternal preference to the “best interests of the child” doctrine, which gives fathers and mothers equal treatment in child custody assignment. We exploit exogenous variation across states in the timing of this custody law change to estimate the long‐term implications of exposure to a gender‐neutral custody law regime. We find that childhood exposure to gender neutral custody laws has a negative effect on educational attainment. A child exposed to gender neutral custody law is less likely to graduate from high school by 1.5 to 2.0 percentage points.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/soej.12403

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:wly:soecon:v:86:y:2020:i:3:p:1041-1080

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Southern Economic Journal from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().