How Does Family Structure Affect Children's Outcomes? Evidence from the Civil War

David Frankel

Staff General Research Papers Archive from Iowa State University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We propose a novel approach to measuring the causal effect of family structure on a child’s outcomes. In a war, some fathers are killed in action and cannot return to their families. This creates a natural experiment in which the effects of a father’s absence can be tested. Using data from the U.S. Civil War, we find no evidence that a father’s death in the war affected his child’s labor income as a young adult. We also find no effect on labor force participation or the chance of being married in 1880. Daughters of fathers who died were less likely to be students in 1880, although we find no such effect on sons.

Keywords: Family structure; female headed families; Civil War; natural experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-05-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-hap and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/papers/p3869-2007-05-24.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: How does family structure affect children's outcomes? Evidence from the civil war (2006)
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:isu:genres:12819

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff General Research Papers Archive from Iowa State University, Department of Economics Iowa State University, Dept. of Economics, 260 Heady Hall, Ames, IA 50011-1070. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Curtis Balmer (econwebmaster@iastate.edu).