Birth Order and Longevity over the Demographic Transition: Evidence from the Netherlands

We study within-family differences by order of birth in survival and longevity in 19th century Netherlands. Using existing matched birth and death records from the Dutch provinces of Groningen and Drenthe, we report no significant differences in survival to ages 5 or 18 or longevity for those reaching adulthood by their order of birth among all siblings. When we allow the effect to vary by gender of the individual and of the older siblings, we find a small negative (positive) effect driven by same-(different-)gender older siblings, suggesting certain within-gender competition on survival. The effects, however, are small -- around 0.5 percentage points on survival levels above 75\% -- and are consistently restricted to early life. Longevity, once the individual reaches adulthood, is not consistently correlated with birth order for more flexible specifications. Importantly, we do not detect any differences by socio-economic status as captured by the father's occupation, nor do we observe a particular trend over time. This lack of observable differences by socio-economic status is noteworthy, especially given the radical changes during the study period, suggesting that it was homogeneously distributed by order of birth.