Age Trajectories of Poverty During Childhood and High School Graduation

Abstract

This article examines distinct trajectories of childhood exposure to poverty and provides estimates of their effect on high school graduation. The analysis incorporates three key insights from the life course and human capital formation literatures: (1) the temporal dimensions of exposure to poverty, that is, timing, duration, stability, and sequencing, are confounded with one another; (2) age-varying exposure to poverty not only affects, but also is affected by, other factors that vary with age; and (3) the effect of poverty trajectories is heterogeneous across racial and ethnic groups. Results from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth show that any extended exposures to poverty substantially lower children's odds of graduating from high school. Persistent, early, and middle-to-late childhood exposures to poverty reduce the odds of high school graduation by 77 percent, 55 percent, and 58 percent, respectively, compared to no childhood exposure to poverty. The findings thus suggest that the impact of poverty trajectories is insensitive to observed age-varying confounders. These impacts are more pronounced for white children than for black and Hispanic children.

Measuring students' school context exposures: A trajectory-based approach

“…Using the conceptual framework and methodological tools that I described in this article, future researchers stand to benefit from a making a more concerted effort to adjust for possible confounds. Approaches that merge trajectory-based modeling strategies with flexible weighting estimators could offer a useful new direction in this regard (Lee 2014;Lee and Jackson 2015;Robins, Hernan, and Brumback 2000).…”

Maternal Education, Changing Family Circumstances, and Children’s Skill Development in the United States and UK

“…Similarly, continuously married mothers are in better mental and physical health than single mothers (Meadows, McLanahan and Brooks-Gunn 2008). Instability in family circumstances during childhood is also associated with poorer development among children several years later—moving in and out of poverty is negatively associated with high school graduation (Lee 2014), and family structure instability during the first few years of childhood is negatively associated with mothers’ mental health and stress (Cavanaugh and Huston 2008; Meadows, McLanahan and Brooks-Gunn 2008). …”

The Intergenerational Effects of Intermarriage

“…This implies comparing grades of two cousins, where one cousin has one foreign-born and one native parent, and the other has two native or two foreign-born parents. Two cousins are expected to share certain characteristics at the family level as their mothers and fathers shared family and neighbourhood characteristics while growing up, and by applying cousin fixed-effects, bias from unobserved parental family background is partially controlled for (Geronimus et al 1994;Lee 2014). Indeed, siblings are not identical in all respects and are not randomly assigned to a partner, and therefore, the cousin fixed-effects approach cannot be regarded as a causal method.…”