IMPACT OF SIBSHIP SIZE, BIRTH ORDER, AND SEX COMPOSITION ON SCHOOL ENROLLMENT IN URBAN TURKEY

Murat Güray Kırdar (), Meltem Dayıoğlu and Aysit Tansel ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper investigates the effects of sibship size, birth order and sibling sex composition on children’s school enrollment in urban Turkey. Moreover, we examine how the effects of these variables vary by household income and the gender of the children. We utilize an instrumental variables estimation method in order to address parents’ joint fertility and schooling decisions where we use twin-births as instruments. In addition, we generate careful measures for birth order and siblings’ sex composition in order to purge the impact of these variables from that of sibship size. We find no causal impact of sibship size on school enrollment. However, there is evidence for a parabolic impact of birth-order where middle-born children fare worse. The parabolic impact of birth order is more pronounced in poorer families. Sex composition of siblings matters only for female children. A higher fraction of older male siblings decreases the enrollment probability of female children in poorer households. In the wealthiest families, on the contrary, a higher fraction of male siblings increases the enrollment probability of female children. The finding that birth order and sibling sex composition matters more for poorer households suggests that scarce financial resources are the underlying cause of the sibling composition effects.

Keywords: Educational Attainment; Sibship Size; Birth Order; Sibling Sex Composition; Instrumental Variables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J10 I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa and nep-edu
Date: 2007-04
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/2755/

Related works:
Journal Article: Impact of Sibship Size, Birth Order and Sex Composition on School Enrolment in Urban Turkey (2009)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:2755

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany
Address: Schackstr. 4, D-80539 Munich, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Ekkehart Schlicht ().