Evenhouse, Eirik, and Siobhan Reilly. 2004. "A Sibling Study of Stepchild Well-Being." Journal of Human Resources 39(1): 248-276.

Examining 33 indicators of well-being from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we conclude that stepchildren's inferior outcomes are not entirely explained by sample selection. Using sibling comparisons to control for unobserved family characteristics, we identify stepparent effects by comparing half-siblings in families in which one child has both parents and the other a parent and stepparent. Most estimated effects retain their sign after differencing across siblings, and a third remain statistically significant. The estimate's sensitivity to the choice of indicator suggests that studies based on a single measure of child wellbeing may be misleading.

Eirik Evenhouse is a fellow at the Institute for Health Policy Studies, University of California San Francisco. Siobhan Reilly is a professor of economics at Mills College. For assistance and advice the authors thank George Akerlof, Kathryn Anderson, J. S. Butler, Anne Case, Ken Chay, Donna Ginther, Kathleen Mullan Harris, David Lee, David Levine, Shelley Lundberg, Charles Mullin, Steve Raphael, Claudia Strow, Joyce Tabor, Anne Winkler, and two anonymous referees. They also thank participants at the 2000 meetings of the Midwestern Economics Association and the Population Association of America, the 2001 Add Health Users Workshop, and the 2002 meeting of the American Economic Association. The authors acknowledge the financial support of the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies, and of the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development under grant RO3HD39933.

This research is based on data from the Add Health project, a program project designed by J. Richard Udry (PI) and Peter Bearman, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with cooperative funding participation by the National Cancer Institute; the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism; the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders; the National Institute on Drug Abuse; the National Institute of General Medical Sciences; the National Institute of Mental Health; the National Institute of Nursing Research; the Office of AIDS Research, NIH; the Office of Behavior and Social Science Research, NIH; the Office of the Director, NIH; the Office of Research on Women's Health, NIH; the Office of Population Affairs, DHHS; the National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, DHHS; the Office of Minority Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, DHHS; the Office of Minority Health, Office of Public Health and Science, DHHS; the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, DHHS; and the National Science Foundation.

Because of restrictions on the use of Add Health data, the authors may share only their programming code. The data themselves can be obtained directly from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, by arrangement with the Add Health Project, Carolina Population Center, 123 West Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27516-2524 (email: addhealth@unc.edu).