A child whose parents divorce before age six will, on average, be earning roughly 9 to 13 percent less by their late twenties than a child whose parents stayed together — not because of anything the child did, but because of what happened in the years right after the split. That’s the headline finding from a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that tracked more than 5 million American children born between 1988 and 1993 using linked IRS tax records, Census data, and Social Security files. The researchers didn’t ask anyone to recall their childhood. They followed the actual money, the actual addresses, and the actual outcomes for nearly three decades.
A Study Built on 5 Million Real Paper Trails
The paper, by economists Andrew C. Johnston, Maggie R. Jones, and Nolan G. Pope, is notable for how it isolates cause from coincidence. Rather than simply comparing kids of divorced parents to kids of married parents — a comparison that can’t rule out pre-existing differences between those families — the researchers compared siblings within the same family who were different ages when their parents split, according to the Census Bureau’s working-paper version of the study. That design lets them isolate what a specific age of exposure to divorce does to a specific kid, holding the family’s overall circumstances constant. Divorce touches roughly one-third of American children at some point in childhood, which is part of why the researchers treated this as a first-order economic question rather than a niche family-studies topic.
The Earnings Gap Opens Early and Doesn’t Close
Kids who experienced their parents’ divorce between ages 0 and 5 ranked 2.4 percentile points lower in the national income distribution by age 25, a gap that widened to 3.9 percentile points by age 27, according to NBER’s own digest summary of the paper. The researchers describe the size of that hit as comparable to losing a full year of education. It’s not a gap that fades as people settle into their careers — if anything, it’s still growing three years after most people have entered the full-time workforce.
Teen Births Jump, and So Do Incarceration Odds
The paper’s other findings are harder to read past. Teen birth rates rose by 73 percent relative to pre-divorce baselines, and the probability of incarceration by age 25 rose by 43 percent, according to the same NBER digest. Child mortality climbed by 35 to 55 percent in the years following a divorce and stayed elevated for at least a decade. These aren’t small subgroups buried in an appendix — they’re central results the authors highlight as evidence that divorce’s costs to children are measurable in dollars, health outcomes, and contact with the justice system, not just in feelings.
What Actually Changes When Parents Split
The paper’s real contribution is showing why. Household income falls sharply after divorce — from a pre-divorce range of roughly $90,000 to $100,000 down to about $42,000 — and stays roughly 30 percent below the pre-divorce baseline a full decade later, according to reporting on the study from the Institute for Family Studies. Families also move more often, and the parent who leaves ends up living, on average, more than 100 miles away. Neighborhood quality — school ratings, local economic opportunity — drops by around 7 percent. When the researchers ran the numbers, these three factors together (lost household resources, downgraded neighborhoods, and distance from a nonresident parent) accounted for somewhere between a quarter and 60 percent of the total effect, depending on the outcome measured.
The Part That Gets Missed
What the study doesn’t say is that divorce dooms a child, or that unhappy marriages should be preserved for the kids’ sake. What it says, with unusually rigorous data, is that the collateral damage of divorce — the income cliff, the zip code downgrade, the disappearing parent — is doing most of the harm, and those are the parts a legal system, an employer, or a co-parenting arrangement could actually soften. A custody schedule that keeps both parents genuinely present, a support order that doesn’t let household income collapse, a move that doesn’t also mean a worse school district — none of that undoes a divorce, but according to the mechanics this paper lays out, it’s exactly where the real leverage is. The economists didn’t set out to write a parenting guide. They ended up writing one anyway.
