Birth Order and the Intrahousehold Allocation of Time and Education

Abstract

This paper develops a model of intrahousehold allocation with endogenous fertility, which captures the relationship between birth order and investment in children. It shows that a birth order effect in intrahouse hold allocation can arise even without assumptions about parental preferences for specific birth orders of children or genetic endowments varying by birth order. The important contribution is that fertility is treated as endogenous, a possibility that other models of intrahousehold allocation have ignored. The implications of the model are that children with higher birth orders (that is, who are born later) have an advantage over siblings with lower birth orders, and that parents who are inequality-averse will not have more than one child. The model furthermore shows that not taking account of the endogeneity of fertility when analyzing intrahousehold allocation may seriously bias the results. The effects of a child's birth order on its human capital accumulation are analyzed using a longitudinal data set from the Philippines that covers a very long period. We examine the effects of birth order on both number of hours in school during education and completed education. The results for both are consistent with the predictions of the model. © 2004 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Know Your Place: Ethiopian Children’s Contributions to the Household Economy

“…In this regard, our paper builds on studies by Emerson and Souza (2008), Edmonds (2006) and Ejrnaes and Portner (2004), the few exceptions to this. Research in other areas has focused on children's outcomes as a function of birth order, or the intra-household allocation of resources -see for example, Behrman and Taubman (1986) and Behrman (1988), and the consensus tends to be that there are significant birthorder effects that tend to favour older children.…”

Child Work and Schooling in Bangladesh: The Role of Birth Order

“…However, Parish and Willis argued that 'a large number of children in the family can lead not to universal resource dilution but to improved opportunities for the later born' (p. 868), particularly in the presence of strong kinship networks and family obligation, which tend to create a large inter-temporal transfer between siblings. Thus older siblings may supplement family resources and offer a greater opportunity for schooling for younger siblings (Ejrnaes & Pörtner, 2004).…”

“…Parents may be unable to equalize spending between children due to capital market imperfection, or they may simply fail to consider financial constraints over the lifecycle (Ejrnaes & Pörtner, 2004).…”

“…Another potential reason for the birth-order effect is old-age security motivation of parents (Horton, 1988;Ejrnaes & Pörtner, 2004). As the oldest child becomes economically active before other children in the household, she/he may have more resources directed to her or him.…”

Investing in children’s education: are Muslim immigrants different?

“…In addition to their parents' level of education, the educational achievements of children of immigrants may also depend on the migration history, including the place of birth and age at arrival (Böhlmak, 2008;Chiswick, 1988), age at migration and language proficiency (Schaafsma and Sweetman, 2001) among other factors (see also Dustmann et al, 2012). Although differences between families may explain as much as 40-50% of the total variation in children's educational attainment (Picard and Wolff, 2010;Ejrnaes and Pörtner, 2004), a large literature surveyed by Behrman (1997) suggests that the intra-family resource allocation varies greatly among children.…”