Consequences of Parental Divorce on Development of Cognitive Skills and Non-Cognitive Traits in Childhood

Hyun Sik Kim, University of Wisconsin at Madison

In this proposal, I come up with a three-stage estimation model to recover impacts of parental divorce on development of children’s cognitive skills and non-cognitive traits. Only using a pre-, then-, and post-divorce framework, can we disentangle complex dimensions affecting children of divorce to a more detailed extent. The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort 1998-99, a multi-wave longitudinal data set provides an invaluable opportunity to assess the three-stage model. Abundant and more reliable measures of cognitive skills and non-cognitive traits in the data set open unchartered and underutilized opportunity to appraise several hypotheses involved in most hotly debated areas in the social sciences. In addition, rich sets of covariates also make it possible to adjust for selection factors widely known to bias parameters of interest. To evaluate parameters of interest more rigorously, a piece-wise growth curve model and propensity score matching method are outlined.