Robert Pollak, Washington University in St. Louis

TITLE: Fathers' Multiple Partner Fertility and Children's Educational Outcomes
Abstract: We find substantial effects of fathers' multiple-partner fertility (MPF) on children's long-term educational outcomes. This cannot be done using existing US data sets. We analyze outcomes for 80,00 children born in Norway in 1986-1988 who grew up into young adulthood with both biological parents. We focus on the children in fathers' "second families," focusing on those in nuclear families. Children who spent their entire childhoods in nuclear families but whose fathers had children from another relationship living elsewhere were more likely to drop out of secondary school (24% vs 17%) and less likely to obtain a bachelor's degree (44% vs 51%) than children in nuclear families without MPF. Our multinomial probit estimates imply that the marginal effect of fathers' MPF is 4 percentage points for dropping out and 5 percentage point for obtaining a bachelor's degree. Our analysis suggests that the effects of fathers' MPF are primarily due to selection rather than resources. Although almost all discussions of MPF have focused on mothers, our results show that fathers' MPF warrants far more attention than it has thus far received.
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