The Rising Educational Penalties of Parental Divorce Across Generations

Edvin Hertegård ()
Additional contact information
Edvin Hertegård: Swedish Institute for Social Research, Postal: SOFI, Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden

No 3/2025, SOFI Working Papers in Labour Economics from Stockholm University, Swedish Institute for Social Research

Abstract: Divorce rates have risen markedly since the mid-20th century, yet our understanding of how this shift impacts children remains limited. This study investigates how the effect of parental divorce on educational attainment has changed across generations for cohorts born between 1951 and 1999. Leveraging detailed Swedish register data and employing sibling fixed effects estimations, I find that experiencing divorce during childhood is associated with a decrease in the likelihood of graduating from high school and attending university. These adverse effects have intensified significantly for cohorts born from the mid-1970s and onward, contrasting with weaker or insignificant effects for children born in the 1950s and 1960s. An analysis of mechanisms rules out several key potential reasons and provides suggestive evidence that the intensified effects stem from a shift in divorce patterns, with divorces increasingly occurring in families with higher marriage quality, making divorce more detrimental on average.

Keywords: parental divorce; family behavior; human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 J12 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2025-01-16
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://su.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1938922/FULLTEXT01.pdf Full text (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:hhs:sofile:2025_003

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SOFI Working Papers in Labour Economics from Stockholm University, Swedish Institute for Social Research SOFI, Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucas Tilley ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).