The Early Origins of Birth Order Differences in Children’s Outcomes and Parental Behavior

By Jee-Yeon K. Lehmann, Ana Nuevo-Chiquero, Marian Vidal-Fernandez. The Journal of human resources, 2016

129 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We document birth order differences in cognitive and noncognitive outcomes and maternal behavior from birth to adolescence using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). As early as age one, later-born children score lower on cognitive tests than their siblings, and the gap increases until school entry and remains statistically significant thereafter. Variations in parental behavior, such as cognitive stimulation by mothers, can explain a large portion of the birth order differences in cognitive abilities before school entry. Our findings suggest that broad shifts in parental behavior are plausible explanations for the observed birth order differences in education and labor market outcomes.

Subfields: Demography, Gender Studies, Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/148734060c006385b083aef6b1d73c1e07cc9023

Citations in the corpus

• Born to Lead? The Effect of Birth Order on Noncognitive Abilities (2017, unknown): “Most recently, work by Lehmann et al. (2014) uses data from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and documents differences in parental behavior and home environment that they argue can explain a substantial fraction of the early birth order effects they document.”