Instability After Adverse Parental Life-Course Events and Educational Inequality: An Empirical Study of Intergenerational Effects

• Applicant: Dr. Kristina Lindemann
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 427560177

Informed by findings from the current ongoing stage of the project, the proposed renewal stage of the project explores how children’s educational outcomes are affected by their families’ income instability, residential and school mobility and high-conflict relationships. These experiences of instability are often prompted by adverse life-course events of parents, such as separation and job loss. As the consequences of instability might vary across families, the project will investigate their heterogeneous effects by family socioeconomic status and the type of life-course events the family has experienced. To investigate potential mechanisms, the project will test the roles of changing qualities of neighbourhood, school and family environments. Due to extensive data requirements, the renewal stage of the project mainly focuses on Germany, but it will also analyse the consequences of school mobility after adverse life-course events in Denmark, which serves as an example of a Nordic welfare state. The empirical analysis relies on survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, the German Family Panel, and the Danish register data, all of which provide longitudinal data over childhood. The project aims to empirically identify the causal effects of income instability, residential and school mobility, and high-conflict family relationships on children’s educational outcomes. In the statistical analysis, the proposed research will rely on siblings and individual fixed-effects models as well as matching methods.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants