Full Citation
Title: Three Essays on the Impact of Child Custody Law on Child Educational Attainment
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2007
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Abstract: I examine in this thesis the impact changes in Child Custody Law can have on children of differing family structures in terms of their educational attainment, and intergenerational educational mobility conditional on parental educational attainment and income. I then explore a possible theoretical explanation for these effects.Chapters 2 and 3 studies the empirical impact of the regime shift from maternal preference to joint custody in custody dispute adjudication in the United States during the 1980s using the one percent Integrated Public Use Microsample Series (IPUMS) of the decennial Census for the decades from 1970 to 1990. Focusing on children between the ages of 15 to 18 who were living with a single divorced and separated parent and of intact families, I found first using cross state and year variation in the timing of adoption of those laws that the children of single parent households living in states which adopted joint custody had a higher probability of high school graduation at age 18. However, children from intact families suffered a decrease in the same probability. This suggests that the law has important unintended negative effects that had thus far been neglected in the literature. The results were robust to the use of the IPUMS Current Population Survey Sample, and Stochastic Dominance Tests. Next using a new distributional overlap measure I found evidence of reduction in alienation between children of intact and single parent families, and particularly between divorced and separated parent families compared with children of widowed parents. This accords with intuition since widowed parent households would not have been affected by the changes in family law. In general, there seem to be a move towards greater intergenerational mobility as a result of joint custody law adoption.In Chapter 4, I model familial choices in labor supply and investments in the quality of children in the shadow of evolving child custody legislations, from the perspective of differential fecundity. The model is able to explain why child support payment rose with joint custody law adoption, and emphasizes the impact the law can have on equilibrium marriage, remarriage and divorce rates.
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Authors: Leo, Teng W.
Institution: University of Toronto
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Degree: Doctor of Philosophy
Publisher Location: Toronto, Canada
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Education, Family and Marriage, Other
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