The Impact of Sibling Sex Composition on Women’s Educational Achievements: A Unique Natural Experime
2008/07/01
研討會日期 : 2008-07-01
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : 陳香如助理教授
地點 : B棟110室
演講者簡介 : 陳香如教授為 Ph.D. in Economics，University of Rochester (2002)。目前為Visiting Scholar，National Bureau of Economic Research。其主要研究領域為Labor Economics及Applied Econometrics。
演講摘要 : In a pro-male biased society, brothers may reduce the parental attention and investment received by female siblings, when parents face time or financial constraints. But brothers may also cause positive externalities. This paper tests when women have fewer opportunities to attend college if they have a brother rather than a sister. We use matched administrative population data from a highly sex-imbalanced economy, Taiwan. To ensure our estimates are not confounded by sex-selective abortions, we exploit the fact that twin sex is purely random, given the sex of the other twin, once we limit the data to time periods in which abortion was illegal and technology was unavailable to abort one of the two twins. The estimates show that the birth of a male sibling, relative to a female, has almost no impact on women’s or men’s college enrollments. If there is any effect, it only arises among females born in rural areas, or those born to mothers whose educational levels were a high school diploma or beyond, and even then it is small and statistically insignificant. The estimates are precise because of the large number of observations in the population data. These results point to the importance of accounting for positive externalities created by a son’s birth, in studies on sibling rivalry.
