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Do fathers really matter ? Or is it just their money that matters ? Evidence from the British Household Panel Survey
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Walker, Ian |
| Copyright Year | 2005 |
| Abstract | It is widely thought that separation has real adverse effects on children. This presumption has been the basis of important policy interventions. However, few studies have attempted to separate out the effects of one parent (mostly the father) leaving, from the effects of that parent's money leaving, on the outcomes for the child. This paper is concerned with a number of outcomes and their relationship to parental separation, and parental incomes. By exploiting the Youth Survey records of the British Household Panel Survey, we investigate "real" outcomes: early school leaving and educational attainment. We also investigate attitudinal data on intentions to leave school early and a direct, albeit subjective, measure of the well-being of the children. While we find that parental separation has strong effects on child well-being, and this result seems to be robust to adding additional control variables, it does not carry over to our instrumental variables analysis. This suggests that there are important unobservables that are correlated with separation and our outcome variables. Indeed, father's income does not seem to matter for unhappiness. Rather, we find father's departure as well as the departure of father's income matter for both children's intention to leave school at the earliest opportunity and real academic achievements. However, we cannot tell whether rich fathers matter more than poor fathers because money matters or because richer fathers are better fathers. * We are grateful to the Nuffield Foundation and ESRC's Evidence Based Policy Network grant to the Institute for Fiscal Studies for co-funding this research. The data was provided by the Economic and Social Research Council's Data-Archive at the University of Essex and is used with permission. The usual disclaimer applies. Corresponding author: Ian Walker, Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry CV7 7AL, UK Tel +44/ |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/academic/walker/current_research/youth6.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
