Estimating the effect of early-childhood citizenship on education using policy changes as instruments

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the effect of early-childhood citizenship status on secondary school education of immigrant offspring. Given the potential endogeneity of naturalization decision, I instrument for citizenship by using a German reform that introduced exogenous variation in the age of naturalization. The reform provides powerful instruments, significantly raising the likelihood of possessing a German passport in childhood. I find that citizenship status increases the probability of attending the highest school track, which gives access to academic education. The effects are of a similar magnitude for boys and girls.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• childhood
• migrant
• education
• Germany

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I21
• J15
• J16
• K39

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for helpful comments and suggestions provided by three anonymous referees. I also thank Annette Bergemann, Daniel Kuehnle, Duncan McVicar, Regina T. Riphahn, Gerard van den Berg, and seminar participants at the University Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ García-Pérez (2013) shows that citizenship correlates with children’s health.

² As in many countries, German citizenship is required for specific jobs (e.g. in public sector or as lawyers), but the list of restricted professions is much longer compared to other countries (Gathmann and Keller, forthcoming). However, most of the restrictions do not apply to EU-citizens. Compared to the US, Germany is relatively generous in terms of eligibility for main welfare programmes, which is independent of citizenship (Riphahn and Wunder, 2013). The access to education is also unrestricted (Avitabile, Clots-Figueras, and Masella, 2014).

³ For example, parents eager to integrate are more likely to naturalize (themselves and their children). At the same time, we expect such parents to invest intensely in host country-specific human capital (e.g. language), which might improve their children’s educational outcomes.

⁴ Details are provided by e.g. Avitabile, Clots-Figueras, and Masella (2013; 2014).

⁵ In contrast, two contemporaneous studies evaluate the effects of birthright provision on educational outcomes within a difference-in-difference framework. The report by Sajons and Clots-Figueras is available at https://sites.google.com/site/christophsajonsresearch/home/research-1 [last accessed: 17.11.2017]. The other working paper is Felfe, Rainer, and Saurer (2016). Earlier Felfe and Saurer (2014) report partly different results. These studies compare children born several months before and after 01.01.2000, and do not account for the transitory provision to their control group born before the cutoff. Such approach might incorporate an identification problem.

⁶ I was unable to link about 1% of children to either parent. They are excluded but my sample includes children of single parents. All regressions include indicators for missing parents.

⁷ My approach excludes Ethnic Germans arriving from the former German territories in Eastern Europe under privileged conditions.

⁸ I exclude children living in East Germany (9%) to avoid the negative selection of cohorts born there after the fall of the Berlin Wall (Chevalier and Marie, 2017).

⁹ Details are provided by e.g. Pischke (2007); Lüdemann and Schwerdt (2013). The specific tracking criteria differ by state. Usually, the primary school teacher makes a recommendation, which according to official guidelines should reflect solely a student’s cognitive skills, with no consideration given to socio-economic or migration background. In practice, some subjective teacher assessment is involved. In several states, the recommendation is not binding, but in practice, the vast majority of parents comply.

¹⁰ For example, educational success might motivate or facilitate a naturalization. Reversely, parents might assign a child’s poor school performance to discrimination, which could also increase the incentives to naturalize.

¹¹ Although submitted in 2000, most of the applications were verified not earlier than in 2001 (Worbs, 2008).

Additional information

Funding

The research was founded by the University Erlangen-Nürnberg.