Curse or blessing: Investigating the education and income of firstborns and only boys

Junichi Fujimoto and Xiangcai Meng ()

Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, 2019, vol. 53, issue C, -

Abstract: Due to social norms and traditions, birth order may have different qualitative and quantitative implications on the education and income of individuals in urban and rural areas. In this paper, we examine this issue by using the Japanese General Social Surveys data. We find that firstborns enjoy more education than later-borns, regardless of gender and the rurality of residence at age 15. We find similar results for income when education is not controlled for. Most strikingly, we find that the presence of male siblings is associated with higher income only for males who lived in a rural area at age 15, with or without controlling for education. These results suggest a potential disadvantage faced by rural boys with no male siblings, especially if they are not the firstborn.

Keywords: Firstborn; Only boy; Sibling composition; Residence; Education; Income (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J30 J31 J38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889158319300279
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:jjieco:v:53:y:2019:i:c:3

DOI: 10.1016/j.jjie.2019.101036

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Japanese and International Economies is currently edited by Takeo Hoshi

More articles in Journal of the Japanese and International Economies from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().