In the Shadow of Brothers: Sibling Spillovers in Migrant Families

Anna Hasselqvist

No 2178, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: Academic inequality between migrants and natives is often attributed to family dynamics that are difficult to observe. Siblings provide a way to study them: I estimate the effect of having a high-achieving sibling on the educational outcomes of children in migrant and native families. Using exogenous variation in sibling achievement from Sweden’s school-entry cutoff in a Regression Discontinuity Design, I show that second-generation migrant girls face a unique disadvantage. A high-achieving brother lowers their grades, while a high-achieving sister has a small positive influence. Spillover effects are negligible for boys and native children regardless of sibling gender. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that traditional cultural norms contribute to this disadvantage, and parental labor market integration substantially attenuates it.

Keywords: Sibling spillovers; second-generation migrants; gender norms; school starting age (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 J13 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 66 p.
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-mig
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.1017975.de/dp2178.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:diw:diwwpp:dp2178

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().