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Abstract

Why does parenting look so different across children? While some children are disciplined with time-outs, others face physical punishment. Some children are expected to become doctors, and others are encouraged to pursue their own dreams. Such variation may reflect differences in the families to which children belong. Alternatively, parenting could be influenced by the neighborhoods in which children are raised. For instance, a parent may be more strict in a dangerous neighborhood as a method of protection. In this paper, I disentangle family and neighborhood effects and estimate bounds on their contributions to variation in parenting. The challenge in doing so lies in the presence of residential sorting. Peoplechoose where to live based on their background, and that gives rise to a correlation between family and neighborhood characteristics. I overcome this barrier to identification with a methodology that leverages sibling and neighbor covariances. This approach accommodates residential sorting but has the strict data requirement of observations for both siblings and neighbors. I fulfill these requirements with a dataset that, to my knowledge, has not yet been used by economists: the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. My findings indicate an average lower bound of 45% for family effects and an average upper bound of 2% for neighborhood effects across a broad set of parenting measurements. I bolster this analysis with a series of heterogeneity and robustness checks. First, I investigate whether neighborhoods matter in the extremes, such as areas characterized by high homicide or economic mobility rates. Second, I employ an alternative mover design to examine how parenting changes with residential relocation. Across all specifications, neighborhood effects are not a substantial driver of the observed variation in parenting. Instead, it is family that matters.

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