Sibling Health, Schooling and Longer-Term Developmental Outcomes

Christopher Ryan and Anna Zhu ()
Additional contact information
Anna Zhu: The University of Melbourne; and ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course, http://melbourneinstitute.com/staff/azhu/default.html

Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series from Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne

Abstract: We explore the extent to which starting primary school earlier by up to one year can help shield children from the detrimental, long-term developmental consequences of having an ill or disabled sibling. Using data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, we employ a Regression Discontinuity Design based on birthday eligibility cut-offs. We find that Australian children who have a sibling in poor health persistently lag behind other children in their cognitive development — but only for the children who start school later. In contrast, for the children who commence school earlier, we do not find any cognitive developmental gaps. The results are strongest when the ill-health in the sibling is of a temporary rather than longer-term nature. We hypothesise that an early school start achieves this by lessening the importance of resource-access inequalities within the family home. However, we find mixed impacts on the gaps in non-cognitive development. Classification-J13, I21

Keywords: Educational economics; human capital; school starting age; sibling health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39pp
Date: 2015-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/downloads ... series/wp2015n21.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Sibling Health, Schooling and Longer-Term Developmental Outcomes (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iae:iaewps:wp2015n21

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series from Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010 Australia. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sheri Carnegie ().