TY - JOUR AU - Carrell,Scott E. AU - Hoekstra,Mark L. TI - Externalities in the Classroom: How Children Exposed to Domestic Violence Affect Everyone's Kids JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 14246 PY - 2008 Y2 - August 2008 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14246 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14246.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Scott E. Carrell Department of Economics University of California, Davis One Shields Avenue Davis, CA 95616 Tel: 530/302-1038 Fax: 530/752-9382 E-Mail: secarrell@ucdavis.edu Mark Hoekstra Department of Economics Texas A&M University 3087 Allen Building 4228 TAMU College Station, TX 77843 Tel: (979) 845-7302 E-Mail: markhoekstra@tamu.edu AB - It is estimated that between ten and twenty percent of children in the United States are exposed to domestic violence annually. While much is known about the impact of domestic violence and other family problems on children within the home, little is known regarding the extent to which these problems spill over to children outside the family. The widespread perception among parents and school officials is that these externalities are significant, though measuring them is difficult due to data and methodological limitations. We estimate the negative spillovers caused by children from troubled families by exploiting a unique data set in which children's school records are matched to domestic violence cases filed by their parent. To overcome selection bias, we identify the effects using the idiosyncratic variation in peers from troubled families within the same school and grade over time. We find that children from troubled families significantly decrease their peers' reading and math test scores and significantly increase misbehavior of others in the classroom. The effects are heterogeneous across income, race, and gender and appear to work primarily through troubled boys. The results are robust to within-sibling differences and we find no evidence that non-random selection is driving the results. ER -