Fallesen, PeterPassaretta, GiampieroSkovgaard Jensen, Simon2025-07-162025-07-162025Fallesen P, Passaretta G, Skovgaard S. Union dissolution and children’s educational achievement: separating effects of school and non-school environments. Eur Sociol Rev. 2025 Jun 12. DOI: 10.1093/esr/jcaf0260266-7215http://hdl.handle.net/10230/70919Data de publicació electrònica: 12-06-2025We 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.application/pdfeng© The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Rendiment escolarSeparació conjugalLectura -- ComprensióEscoles públiquesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcaf026info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess