Web resource:	http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/domesticviolence.pdf
Type:	Electronic publication
Title:	Externalities in the classroom : how children exposed to domestic violence affect everyone's kidsNBER Working Papers
Authors:	Carrell, Scott E Hoekstra, Mark L
Keywords:	Measurement;Impact on children and young people
Year:	2009
Publisher:	National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge
Citation:	w14246
Notes:	There is widespread perception among parents and school officials 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 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 using only within-family differences in exposure to troubled children (i.e., including sibling fixed effects) as well as controlling for school-by-year specific shocks, providing strong evidence that neither selection nor common shocks are driving the results. The presence of these externalities suggests that to the extent education policy increases a group's exposure to children from troubled families, student performance will be affected in a negative way. Furthermore, the results also provide a compelling reason for policy-makers and society in general to be concerned about family conflict since the social costs may be larger than previously known. [Author abstract]
URI:	https://anrows.intersearch.com.au/anrowsjspui/handle/1/21253
Physical description:	36 p.
Appears in Collections:	Online resource

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