The Great Recession, Household Income, and Children's Test Scores

Economic downturns may have important implications for the educational attainment and human capital accumulation of children. We examine how income losses during the Great Recession were associated with children's educational performance in Ireland, one of the countries most severely affected b...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Review of income and wealth 2023-09, Vol.69 (3), p.555-580
Main Authors: McGovern, Mark E., Rokicki, Slawa
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accumulation
Capital formation
child development
Children
Cohort analysis
Economic crisis
Economic theory
Educational attainment
fixed effects
Great Recession
Heterogeneity
Human capital
income shocks
inequality
International finance
quantile panel regression
Recessions
Test scores
Citations: Items that this one cites
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Summary:Economic downturns may have important implications for the educational attainment and human capital accumulation of children. We examine how income losses during the Great Recession were associated with children's educational performance in Ireland, one of the countries most severely affected by the global financial crisis. Using longitudinal data from a nationally representative child cohort study, collected before and after the recession at ages 9 and 13 years, we estimate panel models to examine the impact of income changes on standardized tests. We explore both objective and subjective measures of recession impact, and investigate non‐linearities and effect heterogeneity using quantile regression. While income is strongly associated with educational performance overall, there is little evidence of a short‐run negative impact of income shocks during the Great Recession on children's test scores.
ISSN:0034-6586
1475-4991
DOI:10.1111/roiw.12600