As the developed world has experienced a shift away from the traditional two-biological parent family, scholars have sought to understand how children are faring in non-traditional homes. Debate has arisen over assertions that children from non-traditional families do less well in school....

As the developed world has experienced a shift away from the traditional two biological parent family, scholars have sought to understand how children are faring in non-traditional homes. Debate has arisen over assertions that children from nontraditional families do less well in school....

Problems with inferring causal relationships from nonexperimental data are briefly reviewed, and four broad classes of methods designed to allow estimation of and inference about causal parameters are described: panel regression, matching or reweighting, instrumental variables, and regression...