Fathers’ Multiple-Partner Fertility and Children’s Educational Outcomes

Fathers’ multiple-partner fertility (MPF) is associated with substantially worse educational outcomes for children. We focus on children in fathers’ second fami lies that are nuclear: households consisting of a man, a woman, their joint children, and no other children. We analyze outcomes for almost 75,000 Norwegian children, all of whom lived in nuclear families until at least age 18. Children with MPF fathers are more likely than other children from nuclear families to drop out of secondary school (24% vs. 17%) and less likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree (44% vs. 51%). These gaps remain substantial—at 4 and 5 percentage points, respectively—after we control for child and parental characteristics, such as income, wealth, education, and age. Resource com­pe­ti­tion with the chil­dren in the father’s first fam­ily does not explain the dif­ferences in edu­ca­tional out­comes. We find that the asso­ci­a­tion between a father’s pre­vi­ous childless marriage and his children’s educational outcomes is similar to that between a father’s MPF and his chil­dren’s edu­ca­tional out­comes. Birth order does not explain these results. This sim­i­lar­ity sug­gests that selec­tion is the pri­mary expla­na­tion for the association between fathers’ MPF and children’s educational outcomes.