Fathers' Multiple-Partner Fertility and Children's Educational Outcomes
View/ Open
Issue Date
2022-01-13Author
Ginther, Donna K.
Grasdal, Astrid L.
Pollak, Robert A.
Publisher
Duke University Press
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Rights
© 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Fathers' multiple-partner fertility (MPF) is associated with substantially worse educational outcomes for children. We focus on children in fathers' second families that are nuclear: households consisting of a man, a woman, their joint children, and no other children. We analyze outcomes for almost 75,000 Norwegian children, all of whom lived in nuclear families until at least age 18. Children with MPF fathers are more likely than other children from nuclear families to drop out of secondary school (24% vs. 17%) and less likely to obtain a bachelor's degree (44% vs. 51%). These gaps remain substantial—at 4 and 5 percentage points, respectively—after we control for child and parental characteristics, such as income, wealth, education, and age. Resource competition with the children in the father's first family does not explain the differences in educational outcomes. We find that the association between a father's previous childless marriage and his children's educational outcomes is similar to that between a father's MPF and his children's educational outcomes. Birth order does not explain these results. This similarity suggests that selection is the primary explanation for the association between fathers' MPF and children's educational outcomes.
Collections
Citation
Donna K. Ginther, Astrid L. Grasdal, Robert A. Pollak; Fathers' Multiple-Partner Fertility and Children's Educational Outcomes. Demography 1 February 2022; 59 (1): 389–415. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00703370-9701508
Items in KU ScholarWorks are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.
We want to hear from you! Please share your stories about how Open Access to this item benefits YOU.