EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Birth order effects and parenting behaviors

Jun Hyung Kim and Shaoda Wang

China Economic Review, 2023, vol. 79, issue C

Abstract: While it is well known that there are systematic birth order effects on life cycle outcomes, there is less consensus about underlying channels and mechanisms of birth order effects. We find negative birth order effects among Chinese adolescents, favoring earlier-born children within household in academic achievement, cognitive skill measures, and in parenting behaviors including harsh parenting and parental investment. We highlight harsh parenting as a novel channel of birth order effects, in which earlier-born children are less likely to be physically punished by their parents. Heterogeneity analysis results are consistent with parents reinforcing academic advantage of better-performing earlier-born children, but do not support resource dilution, son preference, or reputation concerns as primary mechanisms underlying birth order effects. Our findings are in contrast to positive birth order effects found among earlier generations of Chinese siblings reported in the literature.

Keywords: Birth order effect; Parenting behaviors; Academic achievement; Cognitive skill (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J10 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043951X23000354
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:chieco:v:79:y:2023:i:c:s1043951x23000354

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2023.101950

Access Statistics for this article

China Economic Review is currently edited by B.M. Fleisher, K. X. D. Huang, M.E. Lovely, Y. Wen, X. Zhang and X. Zhu

More articles in China Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:chieco:v:79:y:2023:i:c:s1043951x23000354