When Size Matters: IV Estimates of Sibship Size on Educational Attainment in the U.S.
- PDF / 939,532 Bytes
- 26 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 39 Downloads / 163 Views
When Size Matters: IV Estimates of Sibship Size on Educational Attainment in the U.S. Christina J. Diaz1 · Jeremy E. Fiel1 Received: 8 September 2019 / Accepted: 30 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Children with additional siblings appear to fare worse on a variety of developmental and educational outcomes across social contexts. Yet, the causal relation between sibship size and later attainment remains dubious, as factors that influence parents’ fertility decisions also shape children’s socioeconomic prospects. We apply instrumental variables methods that treat multiple births (e.g., twins, triplets) and samesex composition as natural experiments to test whether increases in sibship size have a causal effect on the educational attainment of older siblings in the U.S. We pool several nationally representative datasets, including the Child and Young Adult Cohorts of the NLSY79 and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, to obtain adequate sample sizes for these methods. Although results indicate that the presence of an additional sibling has a trivial effect on the attainment of older siblings for most families (those with two to four siblings), a large penalty arises with the introduction of a fifth sibling. Our findings imply that the costs associated with sibship size are likely concentrated among the largest families. Keywords Siblings · Sibship size · Educational attainment · Instrumental variables
Introduction Though children with multiple siblings appear to fare worse on a variety of educational and developmental outcomes (Steelman et al. 2002), there remains uncertainty about the extent to which sibship size causes lower attainment. Parents likely make Christina J. Diaz and Jeremy E. Fiel have contributed equally to this wok. * Christina J. Diaz [email protected] Jeremy E. Fiel [email protected] 1
School of Sociology, University of Arizona, 1145 E. South Campus Dr., Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
C. J. Diaz, J. E. Fiel
decisions about the quantity and quality of their children simultaneously (Becker and Lewis 1973), such that the factors shaping parents’ fertility decisions also influence children’s socioeconomic prospects. It is thus challenging to isolate the effects of sibship size from other family background effects (Black et al. 2005; Bras et al. 2010; Guo and VanWey 1999; Hanushek 1992; Li et al. 2017). We borrow an instrumental variables (IV) strategy pioneered by economists studying fertility effects on economic and family processes (Rosenzweig and Wolpin 1980a, b) to identify the effect of sibship size on educational attainment for those born in the twentieth century. We treat multiple births (e.g., twins, triplets) and same-sex sibling composition as natural experiments that increase family size but are ostensibly unrelated to confounding family background variables. Although researchers have used these strategies to examine sibship size effects on parental investment and early academic outcomes in the U.S. (Cáceres-Delpiano 2006; Conley and
Data Loading...
