Educational Achievement and Family Structure: Time and Money, Period

Research in the U.S. has shown that children growing up in two-parent households do better that those in single-parent households on a number of outcomes, educational in particular. Cross-national studies of educational achievement have found that this finding applies to other Western nations. However, cross-national studies aimed at measuring educational outcomes in a comparative manner in a large number of countries have serious limitations with respect to the measurement of parental background. In particular, non-resident parents are ignored, and even key characteristics of the home environment, such as household income, are not assessed. In this paper, we show that even a very crude imputation method for assigning values to two of the key missing variables modifies the results in a significant way. Specifically, after imputing values for household income and time spent with both parents, the achievement gap with children from two-parent households disappear for children from single-parent households, but not for those from step-parent households.