Parents’ effective time endowment and divorce: Evidence from extended school days

Abstract

Policies that extend the school day in elementary school provide an implicit childcare subsidy for families. As such, they can affect parents’ time allocation and family dynamics. This paper examines how extending the school day affects families by focusing on marriage dissolution. We exploit the staggered adoption of a policy that extended the availability of full-time elementary schools across different municipalities in Mexico. Using administrative data on divorces, we find that extending the school day by 3.5 h leads to a significant increase in divorce rates. Moreover, the effect grows with every year of municipalities’ exposure to full-time schooling. The effects are largely driven by municipalities with non-traditional social norms about marriage, divorce, and women’s priority to jobs, and by women in households with school-age children. Increased female labor force participation due to the availability of childcare is likely to be one of the mechanisms that relaxed restrictions on marriage dissolution.