It is estimated that between ten and twenty percent of children in the United States are exposed to domestic violence annually. While much is known about the impact of domestic violence and other family problems on children within the home, little is known regarding the extent to which these problems spill over to other children. The widespread perception among parents and school officials is that these externalities are significant, though measuring them is difficult due to data and methodological limitations. We estimate the negative spillovers caused by children from troubled families by exploiting a unique data set in which children’s school records are matched to domestic violence cases filed by their parent. To overcome selection bias, we identify the effects using the idiosyncratic variation in peers from troubled families within the same school and grade over time. We find that children from troubled families significantly decrease their peers’ reading and math test scores and significantly increase misbehavior by others in the classroom. The effects are heterogeneous across income, race, and gender and appear to work primarily through troubled boys. The results are robust to within sibling differences and we find no evidence that non-random selection is driving the results. The presence of these externalities suggests that to the extent that education policy increases a group’s exposure to children from troubled families, student performance will be affected in a negative way. Furthermore, the results are also relevant for social policy in that they provide for a more complete accounting of the social costs of family conflict.
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Paper provided by University of Pittsburgh, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
343.