Social capital and dropping out of school early

We make use of a large sample of data taken from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey to examine the effects of various measures of social capital on the likelihood of dropping our of school early (before the 10th grade), controlling for indicators of the financial and human capital of parents. Prior literature has shown that both family structure and attending a Catholic school are related to the likelihood of finishing high school, Our results indicate that more specific indicators of social capital (patterns of parental interaction, number of times the child changed schools) can account for all of the effect of attending a Catholic school, but only a fraction of the effect of family structure on leaving school early.