This paper examines whether parental marriage confers educational advantages to children relative to cohabitation. We exploit a dramatic marriage boom in Sweden in late 1989 created by a reform of the Widow's Pension System that raised the attractiveness of marriage compared to cohabitation to...

This paper studies the effects of growing up in a blended family or a stepfamily on children’s educational outcomes. I use a random sample of 40,000 Swedish children born in the mid-1960s matched to their full and half-siblings born in 1960-1970, in total 76,000 children. Childhood family and...