Heterogeneous Effects of Parental Separation on Children’s Educational Attainment: Evidence from Italy

Raffaele Guetto, University of Florence
Valentina Tocchioni , Università di Firenze

It has been argued that the negative effects of parental separation (as those of other potentially disruptive events) are stronger for children who were less likely to experience the event. This would explain why parental separation has been found to be more detrimental for white/ethnic majority children and children with tertiary-educated parents. However, an alternative explanation is that children of advantaged families have more resources to lose if their parents break up and are thus more negatively affected by parental separation. In this paper, we address the heterogeneity in the effects of parental separation on children’s educational attainment, focusing on Italy. Our main research questions are: Do the effects of parental separation vary according to parents’ propensity to separate – that is, are children whose parents were least likely to separate more strongly affected by parental separation? Can such heterogeneity be attributed to differences in anticipation of (and adjustment to) parental separation, or does parental socioeconomic background matter?

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 Presented in Session 37. Union Dissolution and Children