The Only Child

Julius Ilciukas, Petter Lundborg (), Erik Plug () and Astrid Würtz Rasmussen ()
Additional contact information
Petter Lundborg: Lund University
Erik Plug: University of Amsterdam
Astrid Würtz Rasmussen: Aarhus University

No 17641, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We estimate the impact of having siblings on school outcomes of first-born children. By leveraging exogenous variation in first and later IVF treatments, we construct an improved instrumental variable estimator that tackles exclusion violations and identifies causal effects for compliers and always takers with siblings from later treatments. With nationwide school surveys linked to administrative records, we find that first-born children with and without siblings perform equally well on nationwide reading and math tests, are equally conscientious, agreeable, and emotionally stable, and report the same levels of school well-being. We conclude that the cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes of school-aged first-born children neither benefit nor suffer much from having siblings.

Keywords: cognitive and non-cognitive development; siblings (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C26 I21 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2025-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp17641.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:iza:izadps:dp17641

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().