How Distance to a Non-Residential Parent Relates to Child Outcomes

Astrid Würtz Rasmussen () and Leslie Stratton
Additional contact information
Astrid Würtz Rasmussen: Aarhus University

No 6965, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

Abstract: A substantial and growing fraction of children across Europe and the US live in single parent households. Law practices are evolving to encourage both parents to maintain contact with their children following parental separation/divorce, driven by the belief that such contact is in the best interest of the child. We test this assumption by using information on the distance between non-residential parents and their children to proxy for contact, and measuring educational, behavioral, and health outcomes for a population sample of children from nonnuclear families in Denmark. Instrumental variables techniques are employed to control for the endogeneity of residence. The results indicate that educational and behavioral outcomes are better for children who live farther away from their non-residential parent, but that distance is not related to health outcomes. Failing to control for endogeneity biases the results in favor of more proximate parents. These findings suggest that policy efforts to keep separated parents geographically closer together for the sake of the children may, in fact, not be advantageous.

Keywords: parental separation; child outcomes; distance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 I12 I21 J12 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2012-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Forthcoming - published in: Review of Economics of the Household, 2016, 14 (4), 829-857

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp6965.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: How Distance to a Non-Residential Parent Relates to Child Outcomes (2012)
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:iza:izadps:dp6965

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Fallak ().