New Evidence on the Causal Link between the Quantity and Quality of Children
By Joshua D. Angrist, Victor Lavy, Analía Schlosser. Social Science Research Network, 2006
150 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A longstanding question in the economics of the family is the relationship between sibship size and subsequent human capital formation and economic welfare. If there is a causal "quantity-quality trade-off," then policies that discourage large families should lead to increased human capital, higher earnings,and, at the macro level, promote economic development. Ordinary least squares regression estimates and a large theoretical literature suggests that this is indeed the case. This paper presents new evidence on the child-quantity/child-quality trade-off. Our empirical strategy exploits exogenous variation in family size due to twin births and preferences for a mixed sibling-sex composition, as well as ethnic differences in the effects of these variables and preferences for male births in some ethnic groups. We use these sources of variation to look at the causal effect of family size on completed educational attainment, fertility, and earnings. For the purposes of this analysis, we constructed a unique matched data set linking Israeli Census data with information on the demographic structure of families drawn from a population registry. Our results show no evidence of a quantity-quality trade-off, though some estimates from one sub-sample suggest that first-born girls from large families marry sooner.
Subfields: Gender Studies, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c0fa9b7b40901591f333668bf04527fbd50dbdbb
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Citations in the corpus
- Projection of Populations by Level of Educational Attainment, Age and Sex for 120 Countries for 2005-2050 (2010, background): “Moreover, a perceived negative relationship between children's education and status and the number of children—i.e., the 'quality versus quantity' of offspring— could decrease fertility outcomes (Angrist, Lavy, and Schlosser 2006; Becker 1991).”
- Birth Order, Family Size and Educational Attainment. (2010, methodology): “Do Sex Preferences Really Matter? The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol 90 (2), 285-307.”
- The Long Term Consequences of Famine on Survivors: Evidence from a Unique Natural Experiment Using China's Great Famine (2009, background): “Comparing the outcomes of individuals born prior to or during the famine in columns (2), (3) and (4) to those born after shown in column (5) do not show cohorts affected by the famine as systematically worse off than those not affected.”
- Is Crime Contagious? (2007, unknown): “…for five-room units, and 7.5 percent for units with six rooms or more. across cities.19 At the same time, a growing body of research suggests that family size has little effect on children’s outcomes conditional on birth order (Black, Devereux, and Salvanes 2005; Angrist, Lavy, and Schlosser 2005).”
- Do Population Control Policies Induce More Human Capital Investment? Twins, Birthweight, and China's 'One Child' Policy (2009, unknown): “(2005a), Angrist et al. (2005), Qian (2006)) have used twinning to assess the impact of an exogenous increase in the number of children on measure of child quality.”
- Gender and household education expenditure in Pakistan (2008, background): “…to discovering differential treatment in intra-household 18As a referee of this journal points out, age gaps between siblings may differ for girls and boys within the household since a new born’s gender may affect parental decisions about the spacing of the next birth (Angrist et al., 2005).”
- Sibling size and investment in children’s education: an asian instrument (2008, unknown): “Black et al. (2005); Conley and Glauber (2005); and Angrist et al. (2005) .”