The Effects of Near and Actual Parental Divorce on Student Achievement and Misbehavior

It is well-documented that children whose parents divorced experience worse outcomes than children from two-parent families. However, data and methodological limitations have made it difficult to know whether declines were evident prior to the divorce or whether the declines were due to the unobserved time-varying factors that caused the parents to file for divorce. This paper addresses these questions by linking public records on divorce to child-level data on reading and mathematics composite test scores and school discipline records. Difference-in-difference estimates reveal steady declines in achievement and steady increases in misbehavior after parental divorce relative to children from two-parent families. These declines capture the causal effect of parental divorce under the assumption that the only factor that changed the trajectories of children at the time of divorce was the parental divorce. However, I find similar negative trends in the performance of children whose parents filed for divorce but ultimately chose to remain married. This suggests that post-divorce declines in children’s performance are likely due to the factors that caused the parents to divorce rather than to the legal dissolution of marriage itself.

Lucky in Life, Unlucky in Love? The Effect of Random Income Shocks on Marriage and Divorce

Economists have long been interested in the extent to which economic resources affect decisions to marry and divorce. For married couples, an increase in resources can either provide a stabilization effect or, alternatively, can enable divorce by allowing the couple to overcome costs associated with divorce. Similarly, while economic theory predicts that an increase in income makes an unmarried person more attractive to potential marriage partners, it may also make single life more attractive. However, answering these questions empirically has been difficult due to a lack of exogenous income shocks. We overcome this problem by exploiting the randomness of the Florida Lottery and comparing recipients of large prizes to those of small prizes. Results indicate that while positive income shocks of $25,000 to$50,000 do not cause statistically significant or economically meaningful changes in divorce rates, single women are less likely to marry as a result of the additional income.

Externalities in the Classroom: How Children Exposed to Domestic Violence Affect Everyone

There is widespread perception that externalities from troubled children are significant, though measuring them is difficult due to data and methodological limitations. We estimate the negative spillovers caused by children from troubled families by exploiting a unique data set in which children’s school records are matched to domestic violence cases. We find that children from troubled families significantly decrease their peers’ reading and math test scores and increase misbehavior in the classroom. The achievement spillovers are robust to within-family differences and controlling for school-by-year specific shocks, providing strong evidence that neither selection nor common shocks are driving the results.

The Ticket to Easy Street? The Financial Consequences of Winning the Lottery

A fundamental question faced by policymakers is how best to help individuals who are in financial trouble. This paper examines the consequences of the most basic approach: giving people large cash transfers. To determine whether this prevents or merely postpones bankruptcy, we exploit a unique dataset of Florida Lottery winners linked to bankruptcy records. Results show that although recipients of $50,000 to$150,000 are 50 percent less likely to file for bankruptcy in the two years after winning relative to small winners, they are equally more likely to file three to five years afterward. Furthermore, bankruptcy records indicate that even though the median winner of a large cash prize could have paid off all of his unsecured debt or increased equity in new or existing assets, he chose not to do either. Consequently, although we cannot be sure other recipients of financial assistance would react in the same way lottery players did, our results do suggest that some skepticism regarding the long-term effect of cash transfers may be warranted.

Externalities in the Classroom: How Children Exposed to Domestic Violence Affect Everyone’s Kids

There is widespread perception that externalities from troubled children are significant, though measuring them is difficult due to data and methodological limitations. We estimate the negative spillovers caused by children from troubled families by exploiting a unique data set in which children’s school records are matched to domestic violence cases. We find that children from troubled families significantly decrease their peers’ reading and math test scores and increase misbehavior in the classroom. The achievement spillovers are robust to within-family differences and when controlling for school-by-year effects, providing strong evidence that neither selection nor common shocks are driving the results

Externalities in the Classroom: How Children Exposed to Domestic Violence Affect Everyone's Kids

It is estimated that between ten and twenty percent of children in the United States are exposed to domestic violence annually. While much is known about the impact of domestic violence and other family problems on children within the home, little is known regarding the extent to which these problems spill over to children outside the family. The widespread perception among parents and school officials is that these externalities are significant, though measuring them is difficult due to data and methodological limitations. We estimate the negative spillovers caused by children from troubled families by exploiting a unique data set in which children's school records are matched to domestic violence cases filed by their parent. To overcome selection bias, we identify the effects using the idiosyncratic variation in peers from troubled families within the same school and grade over time. We find that children from troubled families significantly decrease their peers' reading and math test scores and significantly increase misbehavior of others in the classroom. The effects are heterogeneous across income, race, and gender and appear to work primarily through troubled boys. The results are robust to within-sibling differences and we find no evidence that non-random selection is driving the results.

Cash for Corollas: When Stimulus Reduces Spending

MacroeconomicsThe 2009 Cash for Clunkers program aimed to stimulate consumer spending in the new automobile industry, which was experiencing disproportionate reductions in demand and employment during the Great Recession. Exploiting program eligibility criteria in a regression discontinuity design, we show nearly 60 percent of the subsidies went to households who would have purchased during the two-month program anyway; the rest accelerated sales by no more than eight months. Moreover, the program’s fuel efficiency restrictions shifted purchases toward vehicles that cost on average $5,000 less. On net, Cash for Clunkers significantly reduced total new vehicle spending over the ten month perio

Vehicle Miles (Not) Traveled: Fuel Economy Requirements, Vehicle Characteristics, and Household Driving

Retirement_SavingsSimply put, the less Americans drive, the less gas they use. More driving, more gas. The negative effects of gasoline consumption are well-documented, ranging from local effects of automobile pollution on individuals' health to the global impact of vehicle emissions on climate change. So what makes households drive less? In Working Paper 1607, PERC's Rex Grey Professor Mark Hoekstra, PERC's Professor of Free Enterprise Steven L. Puller, UC Santa Cruz's Jeremy West, and Texas A&M University's Jonathan Meer, examine the effects of drivers' behaviors on gasoline consumption

VIS: the visible imager for Euclid

Euclid-VIS is a large format visible imager for the ESA Euclid space mission in their Cosmic Vision program, scheduled for launch in 2019. Together with the near infrared imaging within the NISP instrument it forms the basis of the weak lensing measurements of Euclid. VIS will image in a single r+i+z band from 550-900 nm over a field of view of ~0.5 deg2. By combining 4 exposures with a total of 2240 sec, VIS will reach to V=24.5 (10{\sigma}) for sources with extent ~0.3 arcsec. The image sampling is 0.1 arcsec. VIS will provide deep imaging with a tightly controlled and stable point spread function (PSF) over a wide survey area of 15000 deg2 to measure the cosmic shear from nearly 1.5 billion galaxies to high levels of accuracy, from which the cosmological parameters will be measured. In addition, VIS will also provide a legacy imaging dataset with an unprecedented combination of spatial resolution, depth and area covering most of the extra-Galactic sky. Here we will present the results of the study carried out by the Euclid Consortium during the Euclid Definition phase.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure