Browsing by Author "Spanò, Idola Francesca"

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    Parental divorce and children’s outcomes : some evidence from Ireland
    (Università della Calabria, 2024-03-27) Spanò, Idola Francesca; Piluso, Fabio; Scoppa, Vincenzo
    In this thesis, we examine the situation in Ireland and explore the impact of parental divorce on children using data from the Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) study, the national longitudinal study of children and young people. The thesis is divided into three chapters. In the first chapter, we assess the impact of parental divorce on children’s socioemotional problems using the emotional subscale from the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) (A. Goodman and R. Goodman 2009; R. Goodman, 1997), as well as their physical and dental health through measures of child's overweight risk, physical activity, and dental visit frequency. Employing initially a Difference-in-Differences approach and including later household's fixed effect to control for the unobserved source of heterogeneity, our results show that children who experience parental divorce between the ages of 9 and 13 do not appear to be affected by it. However, when parental divorce occurs during the adolescent's age of 13 and 17, it leads to adverse effects on all the outcomes under consideration. In the second chapter, we investigate the impact of variations in the family structure due to parental divorce on child’s later educational outcomes measured at the age of 20. The novelty of this chapter lies in the implementation of a recently developed double-machine learning estimator, which facilitates a "data-driven" selection of variables. Basically, we compare the results obtained from estimations based on a traditional "ad-hoc" variable selection procedure with those obtained from the machine learning technique. Our findings indicate that experiencing a change in family structure between the ages of 9 and 13 has an adverse effect on educational achievements when the adolescents reach the age of 20. Undergoing such a transition before the age of 9 or between the ages of 13 and 17 does not exert any influence on their educational outcomes. In the third chapter, we study the impact of a change in the family structure, specifically the transition from a two-parent to a one-parent configuration, on the externalizing and internalizing problems experienced by children. Additionally, we assess how the quality of the parent-child relationship is affected by this change. We identify a transition that takes place when children are aged 3-5 and measure its effects both at the age of 5 and 9 respectively. Implementing a Kernel Propensity Score Matching and a Difference-in-Differences approaches, our findings show that children who experience family structure between 3-5 years old have worse internalizing and externalizing problems and the parent-child relationship deteriorates. These effects do not disappear when the child is 9 years old.