Essays in Economics of Child Development

This dissertation consists of two chapters and examines how the family and place of residence in which a child is raised are crucial to their human capital formation. The first chapter investigates how family-school-neighborhood combinations influence human capital accumulation, measured by test score gains. I propose a framework that accounts for family sorting into neighborhoods and schools, as well as potential nonlinear interactions among the three factors. I estimate the model using matched family-school-neighborhood data from North Carolina and decompose the distribution of test score gains into match-specific sources. The institutional setting, where multiple residential areas are assigned to the same school and multiple schools serve the same area, allows me to disentangle neighborhood effects from school value-added. The empirical findings highlight the crucial role of the family and reveal significant positive complementarities in environments where peers achieve relatively high test score gains, particularly benefiting children at the lower end of the test score distribution. The second chapter studies the impact of family disruption on children's test scores by exploiting variations in family composition. To address parents' selection into disruption, I use a dynamic within-child difference-in-differences approach, comparing longitudinal test scores of children who experience family disruption to those of children whose families have not yet separated. I find that, on average, family disruption leads to moderate but significant declines in test scores. However, residential relocation emerges as a key mechanism in this context. In the United States, more than one-third of children whose families separate are required to move, and my findings indicate that it is the act of relocating -- rather than family disruption itself -- that primarily drives the observed test score gap between children who experience disruption and those who do not.

Author dc:creator

• Disch, Lucienne, Ninon Yaelle

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Todd, Petra, E

• Economics

Language dc:language.iso

en

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/61379

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.upenn.edu:20.500.14332/61379