Parental Involvement and Education Outcomes of Their Children

With the goal to shed more light on the effectiveness of parental time spent with their children, I estimate the causal relationship between parental involvement and education outcomes of children. My research is the first which examines the effect of parental time in terms of the engagement in child´s everyday life. Moreover, I improve the existing literature by including the characteristics of children as well as parents. To estimate causal treatment effects, I use a simple logistic regression along with a subclassification on the propensity score. By subclassification, the systematic differences in baseline characteristics are eliminated. The education outcome is represented by a binary variable denoting whether the respondent completed high school or not. Completing high school improves person´s economic selfsufficiency and civic engagement. The results indicate higher probability of graduating from high school with higher parental involvement. Moreover, the probability decreases when child disobeys his or her parent. Most importantly, the results suggest that the expected probability of completing high school decreases with more strict parental behavior.