IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/sin/wpaper/13-a013.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Impact of Family Composition on Educational Achievement

Author

Abstract

Parents preferring sons tend to go on to have more children un- til one or more boys are born, and to concentrate investment in boys for a given sibsize. Therefore, having a brother may affect child outcomes in two ways: indirectly, by decreasing sibsize, and directly, where sibsize remains constant. We develop an identi- fication strategy that allows us to separate these two effects. We then apply this to capture the heterogeneous effects of male siblings in both direct and indirect channels, using 0.8 million Taiwanese first-borns. Our empirical evidence indicates that neither effect is important in explaining first-born boys' education levels. In con- trast, both effects for first-born girls are evident but go in opposite directions, resulting in a near-zero total effect which has previously been a measure of gender bias. These results offer new evidence of sibling rivalry and gender bias in family settings that has not been detected in the literature.

Suggested Citation

  • Stacey H. Chen & Yen-Chien Chen & Jin-Tan Liu, 2013. "The Impact of Family Composition on Educational Achievement," IEAS Working Paper : academic research 13-A013, Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, revised Aug 2014.
    • Handle: RePEc:sin:wpaper:13-a013
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econ.sinica.edu.tw/~econ/pdfPaper/13-A013.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Meng-Wen Tsou & Jin-Tan Liu & James K. Hammitt & Chyi-Horng Lu & Szu-Yu Zoe Kao, 2020. "The effect of prenatal exposure to radiation on birth outcomes: exploiting a natural experiment in Taiwan," The Japanese Economic Review, Springer, vol. 71(3), pages 379-403, July.
    2. Jane N. O’Sullivan, 2023. "Demographic Delusions: World Population Growth Is Exceeding Most Projections and Jeopardising Scenarios for Sustainable Futures," World, MDPI, vol. 4(3), pages 1-24, September.
    3. Xiaoyan Lei & Yan Shen & James P. Smith & Guangsu Zhou, 2017. "Sibling gender composition’s effect on education: evidence from China," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 30(2), pages 569-590, April.
    4. Elliott Fan & Jin-Tan Liu & Yen-Chien Chen, 2017. "Is the Quarter of Birth Endogenous? New Evidence from Taiwan, the US, and Indonesia," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 79(6), pages 1087-1124, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    sibling rivalry and spillover; direct and indirect effects;

    JEL classification:

    • I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General
    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • O10 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - General
    • R20 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - 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:sin:wpaper:13-a013. 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: HsiaoyunLiu (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sinictw.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.