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Civitas Outlook
Topic
Pursuit of Happiness
Published on
May 22, 2025
Contributors
Andrew Johnston
Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash

Divorce, Family Arrangements, and Children's Adult Outcomes

Contributors
Andrew Johnston
Andrew Johnston
Non-Resident Senior Fellow
Andrew Johnston
Summary
This paper uses linked tax and Census records for over 5 million children to examine how divorce affects family arrangements and children's long-term outcomes.
Summary
This paper uses linked tax and Census records for over 5 million children to examine how divorce affects family arrangements and children's long-term outcomes.
Listen to this article

Summary

Nearly a third of American children experience parental divorce before adulthood. To understand its consequences, we use linked tax and Census records for over 5 million children to examine how divorce affects family arrangements and children's long-term outcomes. Following divorce, parents move apart, household income falls, parents work longer hours, families move more frequently, and households relocate to poorer neighborhoods with less economic opportunity. This bundle of changes in family circumstances suggests multiple channels through which divorce may affect children's development and outcomes. In the years following divorce, we observe sharp increases in teen births and child mortality. To examine long-run effects on children, we compare siblings with different lengths of exposure to the same divorce. We find that parental divorce reduces children's adult earnings and college residence while increasing incarceration, mortality, and teen births. Changes in household income, neighborhood quality, and parent proximity account for 25 to 60 percent of these divorce effects.

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This working paper was originally published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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