The Effect Parental Divorce and Its Timing on Child Educational Attainment: A Dynamic Approach

Using 25 years of data on individuals spanning the entire developmental horizon from birth until adulthood drawn from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), this study models educational attainment in a duration framework to examine the long-term effects of parental divorce and its timing on child educational attainment. Controlling for both preand post-divorce family characteristics and unobserved heterogeneity, divorce involving young children are found to be most detrimental for child longterm educational attainments, with the effects being slightly larger for males than females. The results also suggest that family disruptions affect the educational attainment of male and female children through different channels. While the father’s presence and pecuniary resources partially explain the lower educational attainments of male children of divorced parents, these factors cannot explain the differences in attainments among female children, suggesting that potentially more weight are placed on non-pecuniary family attributes in the development of female children.