Is My Parent’s Divorce to Blame for My Failure in Life? A Joint Model of Child Educational Attainments and Parental Divorce

This study examines the potential causal effect of parental divorce on child educational attainments, using annual data on individuals covering the entire time span between birth until the completion of ones schooling drawn from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). A joint hazard model of schooling attainment and parental marital dissolution is estimated, allowing for correlations between unobserved factors that affect the parents’ human capital investment choices toward their children and their decision to divorce. After accounting for dynamic variations in family socioeconomic circumstances, experiences, and family unobserved heterogeneity, this study finds no evidence that divorce negatively affects children’s long-term educational attainments. The findings suggest that the differences in educational attainments between children of divorced and intact parents are not attributable to divorce, but rather the underlying mechanism that triggered divorce in the first place.