Do Sibship Size and Birth Order Matter to Child Education?Evidence from Vietnam

Nguyen, Cuong and Pham, Nguyet and Westbrook, Daniel (2007): Do Sibship Size and Birth Order Matter to Child Education?Evidence from Vietnam.

Abstract

The main measures the impact of sibship size and birth order on educational performance of children between 6 and 18 years old using regression and matching methods. Data used in this study are from Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey 2006. It is found that the number of siblings has a negative effect child school enrollment. An increase of one sibling leads to a decrease of around 2 percentage points in the percentage of school enrolment for children. Schooled children who have fewer siblings are also more likely to have better educational performance than school children who have more siblings. Having one additional brother or sister reduces the percentage of pupils with “excellent” educational performance as well as the percentage of pupils with “excellent and best” educational performance by around 2 percentage points. The birth order also matters to child education. Estimates from regressions and matching methods show that children with a high birth order tend to have higher rates of school enrollment than children with a low birth order.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Sibship size, birth order, education, household surveys, Vietnam
• Subjects: I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I1 - Health > I15 - Health and Economic Development; I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I2 - Education and Research Institutions; I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I3 - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty; J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J1 - Demographic Economics > J13 - Fertility ; Family Planning ; Child Care ; Children ; Youth

References

Angrist, J. D., V. Lavy, and A. Schlosser (2005), “New Evidence on the Causal Link between the Quantity and Quality of Children”, NBER Working Paper 11835.

Becker, G., and H. Lewis (1973), “On the Interaction between the Quantity and Quality of Children,” Journal of Political Economy, 81, 279-288.

Becker, G., and N. Tomes (1976), “Child Endowments and the Quantity and Quality of Children,” Journal of Political Economy, 84, 398-419.

Becker, Gary S., (1960) “An Economic Analysis of Fertility,” Demographic and Economic Change in Developed Countries, Gary S. Becker, (ed.) Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Belmont, L., and Marolla, F. A. (1973), “Birth Order, Family Size, and Intelligence”. Science, Vol 182 (4117), 1096-1101.

Black, Sandra, Paul J. Devereux, Kjell G. Salvanes (2005) “The More the Merrier? The Effect of Family Size and Birth Order on Children's Education”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 120(2), pp. 669-700.

Blake, J. (1981), “Family Size and the Quality of Children”, Demography, Vol 18, (4), 421-442.

Booth, Alison L. and Hiau Joo Kee (2005), “Birth Order Matters: The Effect of Family Size and Birth Order on Educational Attainment”, Discussion Paper No. 1713, The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Germany.

Dehejia, Rajeev and Sadek Wahba. 1998. “Propensity Score Matching Methods for Non-Experimental Causal Studies.” NBER Working Paper 6829, Cambridge, Mass.

Ejrnæs, M. and C. Portner (2004), “Birth Order and the Intrahousehold Allocation of Time and Education”, Unpublished paper.

Goux, Dominique and Eric Maurin (2005) “The Effect of Overcrowded Housing on Children’s Performance at School,” Journal of Public Economics, Vol. 89, pp. 797-819.

Haan, Monique (2005), “Birth Order, Family Size and Educational Attainment”, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Paper No. 111/3, Tinbergen Institute, the Netherlands.

Hauser, R.M., and Kuo, H.D. (1998), “Does the Gender Composition of Sibships Effect Women.s Educational Attainment?”, The Journal of Human Resources, Vol 33, (3), 644-657.

Heckman, Jame, R. Lalonde and J. Smith. (1999). The Economics and Econometrics of Active Labor Market Programs. Handbook of Labor Economics, Volume 3, Ashenfelter, A. and D. Card, eds., Amsterdam: Elsevier Science.

Hong Hai (2009), “Tỷ lệ sinh con thứ 3 tiếp tục tăng”, Dan Tri Newspaper, 02-07-2009. Available at: http://dantri.com.vn/c7/s7-334693/ty-le-sinh-con-thu-3-tiep-tuc-tang.htm Kantarevic Jasmin and Stéphane Mechoulan (2005), “Birth Order, Educational Attainment and Earnings: An Investigation Using the PSID”, IZA DP No. 1789,

Kessler, Daniel (1991), “Birth Order, Family Size, and Achievement: Family Structure and Wage Determination”, Journal of Labor Economics, Vol. 9(4), pp. 413-425.

Lechner, M. (2001), “Identification and Estimation of Causal Effects of Multiple Treatments under the Conditional Independence Assumption”, In: Lechner, M. and Pfeiffer, F. (Eds.). Econometric Evaluation of Labour Market Policies. Heidelberg, Physica-Verlag.

Lee, J. (2008), “Sibling Size and Investment in Children's Education: An Asian Instrument”, Journal of Population Economics, Vol. 21(4), pp. 855-875.

Lu Y. and Treiman D. J. (2005), “The Effect of Family Size on Educational Attainment in China: Cohort Variations”, Paper to be presented in Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America, Philadelphia, 31 March – 2 April, 2005.

Rosenbaum, Paul R., and Ronald Rubin. 1983. “The Central Role of the Propensity Score in Observational Studies for Causal Effects.” Biometrika 70 (1): 41-55.

Rosenzweig Mark R., and Kenneth I. Wolpin (1980) "Testing the Quantity-Quality Fertility Model: The Use of Twins as a Natural Experiment,” Econometrica, XLVIII, pp. 227-240.

Rosenzweig, M. R. and J. Zhang (2006), “Do Population Control Policies Induce More Human Capital Investment? Twins, Birthweight, and China's `One Child' Policy”, Discussion Paper No. 2082, The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Germany.

Rubin, Donald B. 1977. “Assignment to a Treatment Group on the Basis of a Covariate.” Journal of Educational Statistics 2(1): 1-26.

Rubin, Donald B. 1979. “Using Multivariate Sampling and Regression Adjustment to Control Bias in Observational Studies.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 74: 318–328.

Rubin, Donald B. 1980. “Bias Reduction Using Mahalanobis-Metric Matching.” Biometrics 36(2): 293–298.

Smith, J. and P. Todd. (2005), “Does Matching Overcome LaLonde’s Critique of Nonexperimental Estimators?”, Journal of Econometrics, 125(1–2), 305–353.

Truong, S. A., John Knodel, David Lam and Jed Friedman (1998), “Family size and childrent’s education in Vietnam”, Demography, Vol. 35(1), 57-70.

VietNamNet Bridge, 2007 “Vietnam’s Population Growth Under Control”, VietnamNet Newspaper, available at http://english.vietnamnet.vn/social/2007/07/714867/

Wooldridge, J. M. (2002), “Introductory Econometrics: A Modern Approach”.