The Impact of Family Composition on Educational Achievement

Stacey H. Chen (), Yen-Chien Chen and Jin-Tan Liu
Additional contact information
Stacey H. Chen: Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, https://www.econ.sinica.edu.tw/
Yen-Chien Chen: National Chi-Nan University

No 13-A013, IEAS Working Paper : academic research from Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

Abstract: Parents preferring sons tend to go on to have more children un- til one or more boys are born, and to concentrate investment in boys for a given sibsize. Therefore, having a brother may affect child outcomes in two ways: indirectly, by decreasing sibsize, and directly, where sibsize remains constant. We develop an identi- fication strategy that allows us to separate these two effects. We then apply this to capture the heterogeneous effects of male siblings in both direct and indirect channels, using 0.8 million Taiwanese first-borns. Our empirical evidence indicates that neither effect is important in explaining first-born boys' education levels. In con- trast, both effects for first-born girls are evident but go in opposite directions, resulting in a near-zero total effect which has previously been a measure of gender bias. These results offer new evidence of sibling rivalry and gender bias in family settings that has not been detected in the literature.

Keywords: sibling rivalry and spillover; direct and indirect effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J13 J16 J24 O10 R20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2013-12, Revised 2014-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econ.sinica.edu.tw/~econ/pdfPaper/13-A013.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Impact of Family Composition on Educational Achievement (2019)
Working Paper: The Impact of Family Composition on Educational Achievement (2016)
Working Paper: The impact of family composition on educational achievment (2014)
Working Paper: The Impact of Family Composition on Educational Achievement (2014)
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:sin:wpaper:13-a013

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IEAS Working Paper : academic research from Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by HsiaoyunLiu ().