Parents' effective time endowment and divorce: Evidence from extended school days

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Padilla-Romo, Maria; Peluffo, Cecilia; Viollaz, Mariana
• 署名单位: University of Tennessee System; University of Tennessee Knoxville; National Bureau of Economic Research; State University System of Florida; University of Florida; National University of La Plata
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2024.105302
• 发表日期: 2025
• 关键词: Divorce; Childcare; Full-time schools

摘要

Policies that extend the school day in elementary school provide an implicit childcare subsidy for families. As such, they can affect parents' time allocation and family dynamics. This paper examines how extending the school day affects families by focusing on marriage dissolution. We exploit the staggered adoption of a policy that extended the availability of full-time elementary schools across different municipalities in Mexico. Using administrative data on divorces, we find that extending the school day by 3.5 h leads to a significant increase in divorce rates. Moreover, the effect grows with every year of municipalities' exposure to full-time schooling. The effects are largely driven by municipalities with non-traditional social norms about marriage, divorce, and women's priority to jobs, and by women in households with school-age children. Increased female labor force participation due to the availability of childcare is likely to be one of the mechanisms that relaxed restrictions on marriage dissolution.