The Effect of Opposite Sex Siblings on Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills in Early Childhood

Laura Cyron (), Guido Schwerdt and Martina Viarengo

No 627, ADBI Working Papers from Asian Development Bank Institute

Abstract: We investigate the effect of having opposite sex siblings on cognitive and noncognitive skills of children in the United States at the onset of formal education. Our identification strategy rests on the assumption that, conditional on covariates, the sibling sex composition of the two firstborn children in a family is arguably exogenous. With regard to cognitive skills, learning skills, and self-control measured in kindergarten, we find that boys benefit from having a sister, while there is no effect for girls. We also find evidence for the effect fading out as early as first grade.

Keywords: sibling gender effects; gender peer effects; education; cognitive skills; noncognitive skills; early childhood (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J13 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 11 pages
Date: 2016-12-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-gen, nep-neu and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/219496/adbi-wp627.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
Journal Article: The effect of opposite sex siblings on cognitive and noncognitive skills in early childhood (2017)
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:ris:adbiwp:0627

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ADBI Working Papers from Asian Development Bank Institute Kasumigaseki Building 8F, 3-2-5, Kasumigaseki, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100-6008, Japan. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ADB Institute ().