Family Disadvantage and the Gender Gap in Behavioral and Educational Outcomes
By David H. Autor, David N. Figlio, Krzysztof Karbownik, Jeffrey Roth, Melanie R. Wasserman. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2019
298 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Boys born to disadvantaged families have higher rates of disciplinary problems, lower achievement scores, and fewer high school completions than girls from comparable backgrounds. Using birth certificates matched to schooling records for Florida children born 1992–2002, we find that family disadvantage disproportionately impedes the pre-market development of boys. The differential effect of family disadvantage on boys is robust to specifications within schools and neighborhoods as well as across siblings within families. Evidence supports that this is the effect of the postnatal environment; family disadvantage is unrelated to the gender gap in neonatal health. We conclude that the gender gap among black children is larger than among white children in substantial part because black children are raised in more disadvantaged families. (JEL D91, I24, I32, J13, J15, J16)
Subfields: Demography, Gender Studies, Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/de95aa395213aaab7b277a841edab2fa1d284253
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Citations in the corpus
- Exposure to More Female Peers Widens the Gender Gap in STEM Participation (2020, methodology): “Our strategy is analogous to the literature that estimates differences between siblings, including sibling fixed effects (instead of cohort-by-school fixed effects), by, for instance, considering how sisters (women) and brothers (men) are differentially affected by the childhood family environment (”
- Who Needs a Fracking Education? The Educational Response to Low-Skill-Biased Technological Change (2020, unknown): “…due to additional funding, or fall due to crowding, and these changes could potentially influence teen males differently from teen females (e.g., Autor et al. 2019).12 To formalize the discussion of channels, consider a choice between two states—high school graduation and high school…”
- The Life-Cycle Benefits of an Influential Early Childhood Program (2016, unknown): “This result is consistent with findings noted elsewhere: (i) stark gender differences resulting from attending low 63 quality childcare (Kottelenberg and Lehrer, 2014; Baker et al., 2015); and (ii) females are less sensitive to uncertain environments (see, e.g., Autor et al., 2015).”
- Laboratory Measure of Cheating Predicts School Misconduct (2018, unknown): “These measures of school misconduct are important as they have been shown to reliably predict future educational achievement and labour market outcomes (Segal 2013; Autor et al. 2015).3 We expect the laboratory measure of cheating to be predictive of school misconduct because both cheating and schoo”
- The Causal Impact of Removing Children from Abusive and Neglectful Homes (2019, unknown): “3 Our analysis of effects by gender is motivated by prior research, which shows that girls and boys may respond differently to family conditions and circumstances (Bertrand and Pan, 2013; Autor et al., 2016).”
- Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: an Intergenerational Perspective* (2018, unknown): “One prominent hypothesis is that black children have poorer outcomes because they are more likely to grow up in single parent families (Lundberg 2017), an effect that may be especially pronounced for boys (Autor et al. 2019).”