A growing body of research has found support for the idea that children’s behavioral development and school performance may be influenced as much by multiple changes in family composition during childhood as by the quality and character of the families in which children reside at any given...

Almost one-third of all children and 70% of African American children in the U.S. are born to parents who are not married. At the time of children’s births, almost all unmarried fathers have contact with their infants, but this connection drops over time. This study presents a study of 55...

That educational inputs should be important determinants of educational outcomes is a proposition that appeals to common sense, but is nevertheless controversial in the literature both for developed and lessdeveloped countries. Surveys by Hanushek (1986), for developed countries, and (1996), for...

While a considerable amount of research has explored the nature and consequences of childbearing by unmarried young women, little is known about the men who father children with these women. This study uses new data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to describe the economic and...

This study examines whether the intergenerational transmission of human capital, measured by intergenerational earnings mobility, is affected by divorce. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I find that, with each additional year in a family involving a single or a step parent, the earnings...

Our paper utilizes variation across the fifty U.S. states to examine the relationship between public expenditures on children and child outcomes. We find that public expenditures on children are related to better child outcomes across a wide range of indicators including measures of child...

One of the concerns behind parental educational sorting is its potential to widen disparities in the ability of families to invest in their children’s development. Using data from the Fragile Families and Children Wellbeing Study, this paper investigates the association between parental...

The association between parental mental health problems and child wellbeing has rarely been examined in the context of non-traditional families. Using the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS), this analysis exploits the full range of parent relationship types, including married,...

Theories of family functioning suggest that childbearing with multiple partners may increase parenting stress due to changes in social and economic resources and the challenges associated with parenting across multiple households. These family processes may not be equally stressful for mothers...

Using Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Data (N=4,342), this paper examines why relationship status matters for maternal health behaviors. The paper argues that a mother's decisions on how much to invest in her child are partly driven by her perception of how committed the father is to their...