Understanding the Effects of Sibling Composition on Child

Gerald Makepeace and Sarmistha Pal

Labor and Demography from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper argues that spacing between consecutive births is an important aspect of competition among siblings for survival. Since parents simultaneously choose their desired values of birth spacing and the amount of time and other resources invested in children (which in turn affect child mortality), we use a maximum likelihood method to model birth spacing and child mortality as correlated processes while also allowing for family specific unobserved heterogeneity. Our estimates show that the chances of survival in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal increase with an increase in birth interval (prior and/or posterior) and decrease with the birth of a twin.

Keywords: Sibling competition; Birth spacing; Child mortality; Gender differences; Unobserved heterogeneity; Endogeneity bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 I12 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-02-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-lab
Note: Type of Document -
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/lab/papers/0402/0402004.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:wpa:wuwpla:0402004

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Labor and Demography from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA (volker.schallehn@ub.uni-muenchen.de this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).