The effect of sibship size on educational attainment of the first born: evidence from three decennial censuses of Taiwan
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The effect of sibship size on educational attainment of the first born: evidence from three decennial censuses of Taiwan Cheng Chen1
· Sabrina Terrizzi2 · Shin-Yi Chou3 · Hsien-Ming Lien4
Received: 28 February 2019 / Accepted: 11 August 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract There exists extensive literature analyzing the effect of sibship size and a child’s educational attainment, termed the quantity-quality (QQ) trade-off. Studies using data from developed countries tend to find limited or nonexistent effects, while studies that use data from developing countries find a wide range of relationships. We study a possible explanation for these seemingly contradictory findings that the existence or non-existence of a QQ trade-off is correlated with the socioeconomic context within which the family resides. We use the census files comprised of the entire Taiwan population in the years 1980, 1990, and 2000, reflecting different levels of economic growth across time, coupled with an instrumental variable approach and more than 7000 village fixed effects. Our results indicate that sibship size has large and significant effects on educational outcomes, measured in terms of high school and college enrollments, for early birth cohorts, and the effects diminish for more recent birth cohorts. In addition, we find that areas in different developmental stages face different QQ trade-offs: areas with higher levels of development only have trade-offs among higher measures of quality. Keywords Quantity-quality trade-off · Educational attainment · Taiwan · Censuses
We thank participants at the 2016 International Symposium on Human Capital and Labor Markets and the 2018 China Labor Economists Forum for their insights and suggestions on this work. All errors are our own.
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Cheng Chen [email protected]; [email protected]
1
Institute of Politics and Economics, Nanjing Audit University, 86 West Yushan Road, Pukou District, Nanjing 211815, Jiangsu, China
2
Department of Economics and Business, Moravian College, Bethlehem, USA
3
Department of Economics, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, USA
4
Department of Public Finance, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan
123
C. Chen et al.
JEL Classifications I24 · I25 · J13
1 Introduction and literature review One of the long-standing areas of interest in social science is to understand the connection between the family size and children’s outcomes, particularly educational attainment. It is a common-held belief that greater family size negatively affects a child’s outcome through resource dilution (Blake 1981). The most well-known economic theory that links familial circumstances and a child’s educational outcome is perhaps the quantity-quality (QQ) trade-off model (Becker 1960; Becker and Tomes 1976; Becker and Lewis 1973). The theory claims that the shadow price of raising children increases as the number of children increases. Thus, as parents become richer, due to the interaction between quantity and quality in the budget constraint,
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