This paper documents the impact of siblings on the education of men and women born in the United States between 1920 and 1965. We examine the effect of the number and sex composition of a boy or girl's siblings on that child's educational attainment. We find that throughout the century women's educational choices have been systematically affected by the sex composition of her siblings, and that men's choices have not. Women raised only with brothers have received on average significantly more education than women raised with any sisters, controlling for household size. Since sibling sex composition affects women's educational attainment and plausibly may be unrelated to other determinants of earnings, it may provide a useful instrument for education in earnings functions for women. Our results suggest that standard estimates significantly underestimate the return to schooling for women. Copyright 1994, the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Christopher F. Baum).
Related research
Keywords:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.