Does
Childhood Poverty Affect the Life Chances of Children?
Greg J. Duncan, Wei-Jun Yeung,
Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, and Judith Smith
Abstract
Although it has long been known that parental socioeconomic status
correlates strongly with various measures of child and adult achievement,
the causal roleplayed by income remains controversial. Important
unanswered questions include: 1) the role of the timing of economic
deprivation during childhood, especially poverty very early in life;
and 2) how to obtain estimates of the effects of income from survey
data that are free from the confounding effects of unmeasured aspects
of the home and neighborhood environments. After summarizing findings
from recent contributions to this literature, we engage in new analyses
of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics relating children's
completed schooling and nonmarital fertility to income during middle
childhood, adolescence, and, for the first time, very early childhood.
They suggest that economic conditions in early childhood clearly
matter the most and that income effects are nonlinear, with the
largest impact associated with increments to very low incomes. A
second analysis addresses the issue of unmeasured heterogeneity
by using PSID siblings to relate sibling differences in completed
schooling to sibling differences in stage-specific family income.
Although estimated with less precision, results from this analysis
also suggest that economic conditions in early childhood affect
child development.
Greg J. Duncan, School of Education
and Social Policy, Northwestern University Wei-Jun Yeung, Survey Research Center, University
of Michigan Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Teachers College, Columbia University Judith Smith,Teachers College, Columbia University
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