Research

Quick Summary (Non-technical) 

Published version

Abstract: We show that the effects of parental disability on children’s schooling investments are much more negative when parents are highly educated using repeated cross-sectional data from the American Community Survey (ACS) from 2008 to 2019. To isolate the causal effects of parental disability, we focus on children of veterans who become disabled during military service. Within this group, we find that the gradient in children’s private school attendance with respect to the severity of parental disability is much steeper for children with college-educated parents than for children with non-college-educated parents. We provide evidence that these heterogeneous effects are driven by differences in foregone earnings across more and less educated parents. Though parental disability generates larger reductions in parental labor supply for less educated parents, the reduction in earnings is greater for more educated parents. These findings illustrate that parental disability may have larger negative impacts on children that are not traditionally considered to be part of a vulnerable group. 

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