Education, Birth Order, and Family Size

Jesper Bagger, Javier Birchenall, Hani Mansour () and Sergio Urzua

No 7454, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We introduce a general framework to analyze the trade-off between education and family size. Our framework incorporates parental preferences for birth order and delivers theoretically consistent birth order and family size effects on children's educational attainment. We develop an empirical strategy to identify these effects. We show that the coefficient on family size in a regression of educational attainment on birth order and family size does not identify the family size effect as defined within our framework, even when the endogeneity of both birth order and family size are properly accounted for. Using Danish administrative data we test the theoretical implications of the model. The data does not reject our theory. We find significant birth order and family size effects in individuals' years of education thereby confirming the presence of a quantity-quality trade off.

Keywords: quantity-quality trade off; fertility models; fixed-effects; instrumental variables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D52 E20 E24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2013-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-dem, nep-edu and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Education, Birth Order and Family Size (2021)
Working Paper: Education, Birth Order, and Family Size (2013)
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