Sibling size and investment in children’s education: an asian instrument

Abstract

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Empirically probing the quantity–quality model

“…So for instance for female first-borns, we construct three analysis samples: those in families with n≥2 (instrument=female at 2 nd birth; 'ff'); those in families 6 Sex composition was first used as an instrument for family size by Angrist and Evans (1998) and has since been applied by others such as Angrist et al (2010) and Conley and Glauber (2006). These studies use same-sex births as the instrument, whether all-male or all-female; Lee (2008) on the other hand uses all-female births. Another commonly used instrument is twin births.…”

“…In both cases, the direction of the resulting bias of the IV estimate is positive: if postnatal son preferences exist (and affect education decisions), then a sister is more beneficial for girls' schooling than a brother; if scale economies are important, savings may be higher in all-female households (relative to mixed gender households), which is also beneficial for schooling. 29 Concerning son preferences, Lee (2008) points out that the instrument concerns prenatal and not postnatal son preferences, in other words that parents prefer to have sons rather than daughters ex-ante, and not that parents treat sons more favourably than daughters ex-post. 28 Exceptions include Rosenzweig and Wolpin (2000) and Rosenzweig and Zhang (2009), who provide direct evidence on the likely validity of same-sex and twin instruments respectively.…”

“…Further, with the exception of Lee (2008) for Korea, Ponczek and Souza (2012) for Brazil, the existing work on developing countries pertains to China, and findings are contradictory and difficult to extrapolate to other contexts given China's one child policy (Li et al 2008;Rosenzweig and Zhang 2009;Qian 2009). 2 Our paper contributes to this gap in the literature 1 There is an abundant literature showing that parents with large families invest less in children's education than parents with small families, but much of this evidence is non-causal.…”

Fertility, household size and poverty in Nepal

“…We use, as an instrument, a binary variable that is equal to one if the first-born child is a girl, and to zero otherwise. The effects of the first-born's gender have been analysed in various papers (Rosenzweig and Wolpin, 2000), in Asia (Chowdhury and Bairagi, 1990;Clark, 2000;Dreze and Murthi, 2001;Lee, 2008;Li and Wu, 2011;Milazzo, 2014b), and more recently, in Sub-Saharan Africa (Milazzo, 2014a). In Nepal, as in other countries, there is a strong preference for boys.…”

Effects of Siblings and Birth Order on Income Redistribution Preferences: Evidence Based on Japanese General Social Survey

“…Kawaguchi and Miyazaki (2009) used data from Japan to test this argument and found that men raised by full-time working mothers are less likely to support traditional gender roles and are also less likely to believe in the negative effect of a mother working on her children's development. 3 It is widely acknowledged that family structure, such as birth order and the number of siblings, leads to different economic outcomes; for example, accumulation of human capital (e.g., Berman and Taubman, 1986;Kessler, 1991;Hanushek 1992;Oettinger 2000;Black et al 2005;Kantrevic and Mechoulan, 2006;Lee 2008;Dayiogru et al 2009;Dammert, 2010;Cho 2011;Buckles and Munnich 2012), participation in the labor market (Edmonds, 2006), child mortality (Makepeace and Pal 2008;Chamarbagwala, 2011), and inequality (Mazumder 2008). This might be partly because of large birth-order differences in the amount of quality lime that children spend with their parents (Price 2008).…”