Robert Pollak - Washington University in St. Louis

"Fathers' Multiple Partner Fertility and Children's Educational Outcomes."

    Date:  04/13/2017 (Thu)

    Time:  3:30pm- 5:00pm

    Location:  Seminar will be held on-site: Gross Hall 230E

    Organizer:  Marcos Rangel


Meeting Schedule: Login or email the organizer to schedule a meeting.

    All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.

   10:00am - Marcos Rangel

   10:30am - Elizabeth Frankenberg

   11:00am - Joe Hotz

   11:30am - Nivedhitha Subramanian and Romina Tome

   12:00pm - Lunch - Emma Zang, Maria Laurito, Gina Turrini

    1:15pm - Rebecca Lehrman

    1:45pm - Seth Sanders

    2:30pm - Duncan Thomas

    3:30pm - Seminar Presentation (3:30pm to 5:00pm)

    6:00pm - Dinner at Nana's with Marcos Rangel, Duncan Thomas


    Additional Comments:  We find substantial effects of fathers' multiple-partner fertility (MPF) on children's long-term educational outcomes. This cannot be done using existing US data sets. We analyze outcomes for 80,00 children born in Norway in 1986-1988 who grew up into young adulthood with both biological parents. We focus on the children in fathers' "second families," focusing on those in nuclear families. Children who spent their entire childhoods in nuclear families but whose fathers had children from another relationship living elsewhere were more likely to drop out of secondary school (24% vs 17%) and less likely to obtain a bachelor's degree (44% vs 51%) than children in nuclear families without MPF. Our multinomial probit estimates imply that the marginal effect of fathers' MPF is 4 percentage points for dropping out and 5 percentage point for obtaining a bachelor's degree. Our analysis suggests that the effects of fathers' MPF are primarily due to selection rather than resources. Although almost all discussions of MPF have focused on mothers, our results show that fathers’ MPF warrants far more attention than it has thus far received.