Age At Parents' Separation And Children Achievement: Evidence From France Using A Sibling Approach

This paper investigates the link between parental separation and children's achievement inadulthood. Using a French dataset on "Education-Training-Employment", I first estimate arandom effects model and then examine the differences in age at divorce for children withinthe same family, to control for divorced family selection. Three outcomes are analysed: num-ber of years of schooling, earnings-weighted education and social position. Using a randomeffects model, parental separation is linked to poorer educational attainment for their children,from 32% to 12% of a standard deviation lower where the number of years of education isconcerned ; and from 30% to 8% of a standard deviation lower where the earnings-weightededucation is concerned. This effect varies with age: least affected are the 16 to 18-year-olds,and most affected are the youngest. Where social position is concerned, effects are weaker,but remain negative. Accounting for the family fixed effect yields somewhat weaker estimatedeffects for the youngest, but results remain similar. Parental separation is more detrimental toboys' education under both models, but conducting a F-test, we only reject the nul hypothesisfor earnings-weighted education where family fixed effect is accounted for. In results from bothmodels, teenagers who experience a parental separation are less affected if born after 1970, butdifferences are not statistically different from zero where the family fixed effect is accounted for.