Dynamic complementarity in skill production: Evidence from genetic endowments and birth order

Dilnoza Muslimova, Hans van Kippersluis, Cornelius A. Rietveld, Stephanie von Hinke and S. Fleur W. Meddens
Additional contact information
Dilnoza Muslimova: Erasmus University Rotterdam
Hans van Kippersluis: Erasmus University Rotterdam
Cornelius A. Rietveld: Erasmus University Rotterdam
S. Fleur W. Meddens: Erasmus University Rotterdam

No 20-082/V, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: The birth order literature emphasizes the role of parental investments in explaining why firstborns have higher human capital outcomes than their laterborn siblings. We use birth order as a proxy for investments and interact it with genetic endowments. Exploiting only within-family variation in both ensures they are exogenous as well as orthogonal to each other. As such, our setting is informative about the existence of dynamic complementarity in skill production. Our empirical analysis exploits data from 15,019 full siblings in the UK Biobank. We adopt a family-fixed effects strategy combined with instrumental variables to deal with endogeneity issues arising from omitted variables and measurement error. We find that birth order and genetic endowments interact: those with above-average genetic endowments benefit disproportionally more from being firstborn compared to those with below-average genetic endowments. This finding is a clean example of how genetic endowments ('nature’) and the environment ('nurture’) interact in producing educational attainment. Moreover, our results are consistent with the existence of dynamic complementarity in skill formation: additional parental investments associated with being firstborn are more ‘effective’ for those siblings who randomly inherited higher genetic endowments for educational attainment.

Keywords: Birth order; dynamic complementarity; gene-environment interaction; educational attainment; polygenic score (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D15 I24 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-12-14
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/20082.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:tin:wpaper:20200082

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 ().