Parental Alcohol Consumption and Adult Children's Educational Attainment

This study analyses whether parents' alcohol consumption can affect long run children's educational attainments. Using 19 waves of the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS), where individuals and their families are followed from childhood to adulthood, this study analyses how parental alcohol consumption during childhood (between 1994 and 2001) may affect children's educational attainment about twelve years later (from 2006 to 2014). Panel estimations show that mother total grams of alcohol consumption during childhood is consistently negatively associated with adult children educational outcomes, as the probability of having an university degree, the highest level of education achieved and years of schooling. By using direct observation of past parental behaviour, the proposed empirical strategy avoids endogeneity issues that may arise when using contemporaneous retrospective information, while endogeneity deriving from unobserved characteristics determining both parental drinking and adult children educational attainment is addressed using an Hausman-Taylor estimator. This permits the identification of a negative causal relationship between mother alcohol consumption during childhood and long-run children's educational attainment. The study also explores the transmission mechanisms suggested by the literature, identifying a possible role for possible excessive prenatal exposure to alcohol, family disruption, health issues during childhood, parental care needs and intergenerational transmission of drinking habits of the father.