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Title: Home Investment in Children in Anticipation of Divorce
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Schmierer, Daniel A. |
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Home Investment in Children in Anticipation of Divorce Working Paper, Department of Economics, University of Chicago, December 8, 2010 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: Department of Economics, University of Chicago Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Divorce; Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); Marital Conflict; Marital Satisfaction/Quality; Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID); Parental Investments; Pregnancy, Adolescent; State-Level Data/Policy Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. In families that end up divorcing or separating, the spouses invest less in their children during marriage. In addition, investment in these children declines starting about two years prior to the divorce itself, primarily due to lower investments by fathers. This new finding suggests that the anticipation of divorce may be detrimental to children through its impact on parental investment. In order to understand these results, I develop a model of a married couple learning about their match quality and engaging in match-specific investment in their children. The model shows that it is match quality, and not merely divorce, that affects children. I use two implications of the model to establish that the prospect of divorce impacts home investment in children during marriage. First, by using variation over time in the probability of divorce within a given marriage, I show that the probability of divorce is negatively related to parental investment in children during marriage. Second, I use information on marital conflict to show that the home investment levels of families near the margin of divorce respond to differences in the costs and benefits of divorce whereas in families far from the margin of divorce they do not. This finding implies that it is the possibility of divorce that is driving some of the differences in investment levels between families. My results establish a new pathway by which divorce may harm children: the anticipation of divorce decreases investment in children during marriage. This effect can explain a small but significant portion of the gap in investment levels between families that divorce and those that do not; roughly the same amount as is explained by the mother's cognitive ability or father's education. |
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Bibliography Citation
Schmierer, Daniel A. "Home Investment in Children in Anticipation of Divorce." Working Paper, Department of Economics, University of Chicago, December 8, 2010. |