Parental divorce and students' performance: evidence form longitudinal data

In this paper we analyse data from the National Education Longitudinal Study to investigate whether experiencing parental divorce during adolescence has an adverse impact on students’ performance on standardized tests. To account for the potential endogeneity of parental divorce we employ double and triple differences models that rely on observing teenagers from intact and divorced backgrounds before and after the divorce occurs. We find that parental divorce does not negatively affect teenagers’ cognitive skills. Our results also suggest that cross-section estimates overstate the detrimental effect of parental divorce.