Parental loss and schooling: Evidence from metropolitan Cape Town

dc.creatorArdington, Cally
dc.creatorLeibbrandt, Murray
dc.date2012-12-03T12:05:00Z
dc.date2012-12-03T12:05:00Z
dc.date2009-11
dc.date.accessioned2015-05-28T10:04:58Z
dc.date.available2015-05-28T10:04:58Z
dc.date.issued2015-05-28
dc.descriptionThis paper makes use of the Cape Area Panel study (CAPS), a longitudinal study of youth and their families in metropolitan Cape Town in order to broaden the empirical body of evidence of the causal impact of parental death on childrens schooling in South Africa in two dimensions. First, analysis of CAPS allows us to examine the extent to which results may generalize across geographically and socioeconomically distinct areas. Second, CAPS allows for an explicit exploration of whether the causal impact lessens as time since the parental death lengthens. Evidence from the CAPS is consistent with that from a large demographic surveillance site in rural KwaZulu-Natal in supporting the findings that mothers deaths have a causal impact on childrens schooling outcomes and that there is no evidence of a causal effect of paternal loss on schooling for African children. The loss of a father has a significant negative impact on the education of coloured children but a significant amount of this impact is driven by socioeconomic status. We exploit the longitudinal data to investigate the extent to which orphan disadvantage precedes parental death and whether orphans begin to recover in the period following a parents death or whether they continue to fall behind. We find no evidence of orphan recovery in the period following their parents death and results suggest that negative impacts increase with the time since the parent died. The longer-run impact of parental death in childhood is also evident in an analysis of the completion of secondary schooling by early adulthood. These results suggest that parental death will reduce the ultimate human capital attainment of the child.
dc.identifierhttp://hdl.handle.net/11090/13
dc.identifier.ris TY - Report DA - 2015-05-28 DB - OpenUCT DP - University of Cape Town KW - CAPS KW - Longitudinal data KW - Cape Town KW - Parental death KW - KwaZulu-Natal KW - Education KW - Childhood LK - https://open.uct.ac.za PB - University of Cape Town PY - 2015 T1 - Parental loss and schooling: Evidence from metropolitan Cape Town TI - Parental loss and schooling: Evidence from metropolitan Cape Town UR - http://hdl.handle.net/11090/13 ER - en_ZA
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/11090/13
dc.language.isoeng
dc.publisherSouthern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit
dc.publisher.departmentSALDRUen_ZA
dc.publisher.facultyFaculty of Commerceen_ZA
dc.publisher.institutionUniversity of Cape Town
dc.subjectCAPS
dc.subjectLongitudinal data
dc.subjectCape Town
dc.subjectParental death
dc.subjectKwaZulu-Natal
dc.subjectEducation
dc.subjectChildhood
dc.titleParental loss and schooling: Evidence from metropolitan Cape Town
dc.typeReport
uct.type.publicationResearchen_ZA
uct.type.resourceSALDRU Reporten_ZA
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