Sibling Health, Schooling and Longer-Term Developmental Outcomes

Christopher Ryan and Anna Zhu ()
Additional contact information
Anna Zhu: RMIT University

No 10253, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

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.

Keywords: school starting age; human capital; educational economics; sibling health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2016-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: S. Mendolina, M. O'Brien, A. R. Paloya, O. Yerokhin (eds.), Critial Perspectives on Economics of Education, Routledge, 2022

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp10253.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Sibling Health, Schooling and Longer-Term Developmental Outcomes (2015)
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:iza:izadps:dp10253

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().