Birth order, socioeconomic background and educational attainment

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the effect of birth order on educational attainment in the United States and the underlying mechanism producing these effects. Using a family fixed effects model, we find negative birth order effects on educational outcomes. However, this effect varies depending on the household's income, being the strongest for households with the highest income and diminishing as households' income decreases. In addition, we show that the timing of income across childhood is important for completed education, as the largest gap in educational attainment between siblings emerges between those who were born and spent their early childhood in wealthier households.

KEYWORDS:

• Birth order
• human capital development
• household income
• education

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D1
• I2
• J1

Acknowledgments

We thank Sheng Guo, Norihiko Matsuda, Andrei Munteanu, Tobias Pfutze and participants at the Annual Scientific Conferences of Romanian Academic Economists from Abroad (ERMAS) for valuable feedback and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Lundborg, Nilsson, and Rooth (2014), Chetty et al. (2014, 2016) and Chetty and Hendren (2018).

2 Positive birth order effects- first-born children perform worse than their siblings; Negative birth order effects- first-born children have better educational outcomes than their siblings.

3 Using data from Mexico, a middle-income country, Esposito, Kumar, and Villaseñor (2020) finds that higher wealth is associated with stronger negative birth order effects on educational outcomes. De Haan, Plug, and Rosero (2014), using data from Ecuador, finds positive birth order effects, which are reversed for the wealthy and highly educated families. Black, Devereux, and Salvanes (2005), using data from Norway, analyzes children's completed education in adulthood considering the family's background.

4 Kim (2020) uses a long panel data that allows him to follow families across two generations and has data on different characteristics of both parents and children at various ages of the children. These data allow him to identify possible explanations for the birth order effects. He finds that parental expectations, children's own attitudes, academic performances, and IQ scores in high school are significantly associated with birth order in ways that favor the first child.

5 Other studies have found that birth order effects are negative starting at an earlier age (Bonesrønning and Massih 2011; Lehmann, Nuevo-Chiquero, and Vidal-Fernandez 2018) which would tend to indicate that the tutoring effect is not the only one that has a positive impact on first-born's educational attainment.

6 Lehmann, Nuevo-Chiquero, and Vidal-Fernandez (2018)'s analysis cannot capture if some of these activities are performed by the first-born child, compensating for the parents, which would reinforce the child's advantage through teaching effects

7 For example, If we observe the age for an individual in 1990 and 1992, we input the age for 1991