Abstract
Previous research shows that living in a non-intact family is associated with educational disadvantages. This paper compares the relationships between childhood family structure, schooling, and earnings in Sweden and the USA. This comparison is interesting because both family structure and public policies differ significantly. We find a negative relationship between living in a non-intact family and child outcomes, and the estimates are remarkably similar in both countries. After using sibling-difference models, the correlation with family structure is no longer significant. These results cast doubt on the causal interpretation of the negative relationship between non-intact family structures and child outcomes.
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Notes
The sample sizes are somewhat smaller in the analysis of earnings in 1996 as fewer persons had positive earnings.
Wolfe, Haveman, Ginther, and An (1996) enumerate papers with the window problem.
In the US samples, to be considered a stepparent, an individual must be married to the biological parent of the child. The proportion of childhood in a given family structure in the NLSY is measured as the number of years in that family structure divided by 17. In most cases, an individual’s childhood (ages 1–16) is not entirely observed between 1968 and 1985 in the PSID sample. Thus, we define family structure as the number of years a child between the ages of 1 and 16 is observed in the sample in a given family structure divided by the total number of years the child is ages 1–16 between 1968 and 1985. The proportion of childhood in a given family structure in Sweden is measured as the number of bidecennial censuses observed in that family structure divided by 4 in the descriptive section below and in the cross-section estimations but divided by 3 for the FE-estimations, see Section 3.1.
In some cases, PSID observations have zero sampling weights in 1993 because of exit and reentry into the sample. For these observations, we assign the average sampling weight. In addition, the 1994 sampling weight may be missing because the number of years of schooling was observed in a previous year; we also assign the average sampling weight for these cases.
Both of these differences are significant at the 5% (or less) level of significance.
Note also that the standard argument that measurement-error bias is aggravated in sibling-difference models comes from research on the returns to schooling – where years of schooling is an independent variable – and does not apply to our study. In returns to schooling applications, the educational attainment of two siblings are measured independently in two interviews and any (independent) measurement error leads to a sibling difference in educational attainment that does not exist. In our data sets, family structure is, by construction, defined in the same way for two siblings who belong to the same family. This said, we do not rule out that some measurement-error bias plague the results from many sibling-difference analyses of family structure, and we recommend that future research effort be devoted to this somewhat neglected question.
Out of consideration of space, the results of these tests are not presented here but can be obtained from the authors upon request.
There are too few half siblings for a meaningful analysis.
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Acknowledgements
Ginther acknowledges financial support from the University of Kansas General Research Fund. Björklund and Sundström thank the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research for financial support. Ginther, Björklund, and Sundström acknowledge financial support from NICHD Grant R03HD048931 and thank the anonymous referees for their comments.
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Björklund, A., Ginther, D.K. & Sundström, M. Family structure and child outcomes in the USA and Sweden. J Popul Econ 20, 183–201 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-006-0094-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-006-0094-7