Union dissolution and children’s educational achievement: separating effects of school and non-school environments

Abstract

We study whether the educational disadvantage of children from households where parents have dissolved their union is due to selection or deteriorating non-school environments and whether exposure to school environments compensates or exacerbates such disadvantage. We apply a differential exposure approach (DEA) to Danish population data collecting public-school reading comprehension tests. The approach exploits variation in children’s birth dates and test administration dates to decompose children’s learning as the product of joint exposure to school and non-school environments. We find that children experiencing parental separation have 5–7 per cent lower test scores, with lower learning returns to non-school environments, and diminishing learning outcomes proportional to time spent in separated households. Critically, school appears to neither mitigate nor exacerbate these achievement gaps, suggesting that degrading of non-school environment post-separation primarily impacts children’s learning.