IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/87310.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The birth order paradox: sibling differences in educational attainment

Author

Listed:
  • Barclay, Kieron J.

Abstract

This study uses population register data to examine the relationship between birth order and educational attainment in Sweden, and demonstrates that while the net effect of birth order on educational attainment is negative, later-born children often spend longer in education. The explanation for this finding is due to educational expansion in Sweden in the 20th century, which outweighs the negative causal effect of birth order for the affected cohorts. This is particularly true for women due to the fact that the rate of increasing educational enrolment has been greater for women than for men. These results also show that later-borns in large families particularly benefit from educational expansion due to the longer average birth interval between the first and last child in large families, meaning that the supply of educational opportunities increased to a greater extent in the intervening period. However, in periods where education is not expanding, later-born siblings continue to fare worse than first-borns.

Suggested Citation

  • Barclay, Kieron J., 2018. "The birth order paradox: sibling differences in educational attainment," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 87310, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:87310
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/87310/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Xiong, Feng & Zang, Leizhen & Zhou, Ling & Liu, Fei, 2020. "The effect of number of siblings and birth order on educational attainment: Empirical Evidence from Chinese General Social Survey," International Journal of Educational Development, Elsevier, vol. 78(C).
    2. Fujimoto, Junichi & Meng, Xiangcai, 2019. "Curse or blessing: Investigating the education and income of firstborns and only boys," Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 1-1.
    3. Kieron J. Barclay & Torkild H. Lyngstad & Dalton Conley, 2018. "The production of inequalities within families and across generations: the intergenerational effects of birth order and family size on educational attainment," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2018-002, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    4. Kieron Barclay & Torkild Lyngstad & Dalton Conley, 2018. "The Production of Inequalities within Families and Across Generations: The Intergenerational Effects of Birth Order and Family Size on Educational Attainment," NBER Working Papers 24530, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Heather Congdon Fors & Annika Lindskog, 2023. "Within‐family inequalities in human capital accumulation in India," Review of Development Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 27(1), pages 3-28, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    birth order; educational attainment; educational expansion; Sweden;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C1 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:87310. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.