Keeping it in the family
Tim Johnson & Christopher Dawes
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Myriad studies show that politically-salient events influence civic and political engagement. Yet, on the other hand, decades of research indicate that familial factors mold political and civic dispositions early in life, before an individual experiences political events outside the family. Viewing these two lines of research together, we ask if individuals’ political and civic dispositions might be influenced not solely by their own experiences, but, also, by the experiences of those individuals who create their family environment — namely, their parents. Do parents’ life experiences — before the birth of their children — affect their offspring’s public engagement? To answer that question, we examine how the assignment of military service, via the Vietnam-era Selective Service Lotteries, affected rates of public participation among the children of draft-eligible men. Our analysis finds a negative relationship between a father’s probability of draft-induced military service and his offspring’s public participation. In addition to highlighting how parents’ life experiences can influence the social behavior of their children, this finding challenges the prevailing view that the Vietnam conflict did not contribute to declining civic engagement and it shows how experiences within bureaucratic institutions can yield long-standing effects on politically-relevant behaviors.
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Maya Rossin-Slater
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
With nearly half of U.S. births occurring out of wedlock, understanding how parents navigate their relationship options is important. This paper examines the consequences of a large exogenous change to parental relationship contract options on parental behavior and child well-being. Identification comes from the staggered timing of state reforms that substantially lowered the cost of legal paternity establishment. I show that the resulting increases in paternity establishment are partially driven by reductions in parental marriage. Although unmarried fathers become more involved with their children along some dimensions, the net effects on father involvement and child well-being are negative or zero.
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What mom and dad’s match means for junior: Marital sorting and child outcomes
Ryan Edwards & Jennifer Roff
Labour Economics, June 2016, Pages 43–56
Abstract:
This paper employs recently developed marital matching models to examine empirically the role played by marital sorting in observed measures of marital production. Using the US Collaborative Perinatal Project (CPP), a large-scale study from the 1960s, and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY), we find that marital surplus is strongly correlated with indices of child quality, as measured by cognitive test scores, and with the durability of the marital union. At ages beyond infancy, the correlation between cognitive outcomes and marital surplus is robust to the inclusion of the parental characteristics that generate the match, suggesting that the correlation represents effects of the match itself. High marital surplus is associated with assortative mating on education and age, suggesting complementarity in parental inputs in child production. Our results suggest that marital surplus is an important input for child quality above and beyond its indirect effects on marital stability.
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Household Crowding During Childhood and Long-Term Education Outcomes
Leonard Lopoo & Andrew London
Demography, June 2016, Pages 699-721
Abstract:
Household crowding, or having more household members than rooms in one’s residence, could potentially affect a child’s educational attainment directly through a number of mechanisms. We use U.S. longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to derive new measures of childhood crowding and estimate negative associations between crowding during one’s high school years and, respectively, high school graduation by age 19 and maximum education at age 25. These negative relationships persist in multivariate models in which we control for the influence of a variety of factors, including socioeconomic status and housing-cost burden. Given the importance of educational attainment for a range of midlife and later-life outcomes, this study suggests that household crowding during one’s high school years is an engine of cumulative inequality over the life course.
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Coresidence Duration and Cues of Maternal Investment Regulate Sibling Altruism Across Cultures
Daniel Sznycer et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Genetic relatedness is a fundamental determinant of social behavior across species. Over the last few decades, researchers have been investigating the proximate psychological mechanisms that enable humans to assess their genetic relatedness to others. Much of this work has focused on identifying cues that predicted relatedness in ancestral environments and examining how they regulate kin-directed behaviors. Despite progress, many basic questions remain unanswered. Here we address three of these questions. First, we examine the replicability of the effect of two association-based cues to relatedness — maternal perinatal association (MPA) and coresidence duration — on sibling-directed altruism. MPA, the observation of a newborn being cared for by one’s mother, strongly signals relatedness, but is only available to the older sibling in a sib-pair. Younger siblings, to whom the MPA cue is not available, appear to fall back on the duration of their coresidence with an older sibling. Second, we determine whether the effects of MPA and coresidence duration on sibling-directed altruism obtain across cultures. Last, we explore whether paternal perinatal association (PPA) informs sibship. Data from six studies conducted in California, Hawaii, Dominica, Belgium, and Argentina support past findings regarding the role of MPA and coresidence duration as cues to siblingship. By contrast, PPA had no effect on altruism. We report on levels of altruism toward full, half, and step siblings, and discuss the role alternate cues might play in discriminating among these types of siblings.
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Reducing children's behavior problems through social capital: A causal assessment
Ruth López Turley et al.
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Behavior problems among young children have serious detrimental effects on short and long-term educational outcomes. An especially promising prevention strategy may be one that focuses on strengthening the relationships among families in schools, or social capital. However, empirical research on social capital has been constrained by conceptual and causal ambiguity. This study attempts to construct a more focused conceptualization of social capital and aims to determine the causal effects of social capital on children's behavior. Using data from a cluster randomized trial of 52 elementary schools, we apply several multilevel models to assess the causal relationship, including intent to treat and treatment on the treated analyses. Taken together, these analyses provide stronger evidence than previous studies that social capital improves children's behavioral outcomes and that these improvements are not simply a result of selection into social relations but result from the social relations themselves.
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Are ‘born to rebel’ last-borns more likely to be self-employed?
Liang Han & Francis Greene
Personality and Individual Differences, October 2016, Pages 270–275
Abstract:
This paper investigates birth order effects on adult self-employment. Drawing on Sulloway's ‘born to rebel’ thesis, we test whether or not last-borns whose parents have no prior self-employment experience are more likely to bear and assume the risks associated with self-employment. We also test if parental self-employment experience moderates the relationship between last-borns and self-employment. Using large-scale life-span data on 6322 cohort members, a within-family design, and controlling for demographic confounds such as the number of siblings, we find that last-borns from non-entrepreneurial families are more likely to be self-employed than first or middle-borns. However, in families with parental experience of self-employment, we find that last-borns in three or more child families are no more likely to be self-employed than their siblings.
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Patrick Richard
Journal of Family and Economic Issues, June 2016, Pages 156-171
Abstract:
Children with emotional and behavioral problems (EBP) may have a negative effect on their mothers’ earnings because they require additional time for treatment. On the other hand, children with EBP require additional financial resources, which may increase their mothers’ earnings through an increase in work activities. This study examined the impact of children’s EBP on parental earnings, while accounting for omitted variable bias. This study found significant reductions of single mothers’ wage rate/annual earnings if their children have EBP. Conversely, children’s EBP increased their married mothers’ hourly wage. These results have important implications in terms of public policy such as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 in terms of expanding health insurance coverage to children with EBP to have access to appropriate treatment.
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Income Effects in Labor Supply: Evidence from Child-Related Tax Benefit
Philippe Wingender & Sara LaLumia
U.S. Census Bureau Working Paper, May 2016
Abstract:
A parent whose child is born in December can claim child-related tax benefits when she files her tax return a few months later. Parents of children born in January must wait more than a year before they can receive child-related tax benefits. As a result, families with December births have higher after-tax income in the first year of a child's life than otherwise similar families with January births. This paper estimates the corresponding income effect on maternal labor supply, testing whether mothers who give birth in December work and earn less in the months following birth. We use data from the American Community Survey, the Survey of Income and Program Participation, and the 2000 Decennial Census. We find that December mothers have a lower probability of working, particularly in the third month after a child's birth. Earnings data from the SIPP indicate that an additional dollar of child-related tax benefits reduces annual maternal earnings in the year following a child's birth by approximately one dollar.
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Gerard van den Berg, Petter Lundborg & Johan Vikstrom
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study the short-run and long-run economic impact of one of the largest losses that an individual can face; the death of a child. We utilise unique registers on the entire Swedish population, combining information on the date and cause of death with parental outcomes. We exploit the longitudinal dimension of the data and deal with several selection issues. Losing a child has adverse effects on labor income, employment status, marital status and hospitalizations. The value of policy measures aimed at preventing mortal accidents of children is underestimated if it does not take bereavement effects on parents into account.
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Children Living With Uninsured Family Members: Differences by Family Structure
Sharon Bzostek & Christine Percheski
Journal of Marriage and Family, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite increased access to insurance through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, uninsurance rates are expected to remain relatively high. Having uninsured family members may expose children to financial hardships. Eligibility rules governing both private and public health insurance are based on outdated expectations about family structure. Using 2009–2011 data from the National Health Interview Survey (N = 65,038), the authors investigated family structure differences in family-level insurance coverage of households with children. Children living with married biological parents were the least likely to have uninsured family members and most likely to have all family members covered by private insurance. Controlling for demographic characteristics and income, children in single-mother families had the same risk of having an uninsured family member as children in married-parent families. Children with cohabiting biological parents had higher rates of family uninsurance than children with married biological parents, even accounting for other characteristics.
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Effects of maternal depression on family food insecurity
Kelly Noonan, Hope Corman & Nancy Reichman
Economics & Human Biology, September 2016, Pages 201–215
Abstract:
We use data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Birth Cohort to estimate the effects of maternal depression, a condition that is fairly common and can be severe, on food insecurity, a hardship that has increased substantially in the U.S. Using various model specifications, we find convincing evidence that severe maternal depression increases the likelihood that young children experience food insecurity by 23–69%, with estimates depending on model specification and measures of depression and food insecurity. For household food insecurity, the corresponding estimates are 11–79%. We also find that maternal mental illness increases reliance on several types of public programs, suggesting that the programs play a buffering role.
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Katherine Pears, Hyoun Kim & Philip Fisher
Children and Youth Services Review, June 2016, Pages 156–165
Abstract:
Children in foster care are at high risk for poor psychosocial outcomes, including school failure, alcohol and other substance abuse, and criminal behaviors. Promoting healthy development by increasing broad-impact positive skills may help reduce some of the risk factors for longer-term negative outcomes. School readiness has been linked to a number of positive outcomes across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and may also boost intermediary positive skills such as self-competence. This paper presents findings from a longitudinal study involving 192 children in foster care who were 5 years old at the start of the study. They participated in a randomized controlled trial of a school readiness program to prepare them for kindergarten. Outcomes were assessed at third grade (9 years old) on variables associated with risk for later involvement in substance use and delinquency. These included positive attitudes towards alcohol use, positive attitudes towards antisocial behaviors, and involvement with deviant peers. Results showed that the intervention decreased positive attitudes towards alcohol use and antisocial behaviors. Further, the mediating role of children's self-competence was tested. The intervention positively influenced children's third-grade self-competence, which in turn, decreased their involvement with deviant peers. Findings suggest that promoting school readiness in children in foster care can have far-reaching, positive effects and that increased self-competence may be a mechanism for reducing risk.