Parental divorces and children's educational outcomes in Senegal

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This paper studies how parental divorce affects investments in children’s primary education in Senegal. It provides novel evidence on an under-researched topic: the impact of parental divorces on children in a society where safety nets are more often provided by family than by formal institutions. We use a siblings fixed-effects estimation that exploits the variations in the age of the siblings at the time of divorce while controlling for family-invariant omitted variables. We compare children who were old enough at divorce date to have been enrolled in primary school to their younger siblings, for whom enrollment decisions had not yet been taken at the time of the divorce. We find that younger siblings are more likely than their older siblings to have attended primary school. There are no differences between siblings when considering primary school completion: divorce does not increase the likelihood to drop out from primary school. Overall, divorce does not seem to have negative consequences on children when we consider primary school level outcomes. Disruption caused by a divorce may be more severe for older children.