The Impact of Family Composition on Educational Achievement
2014/10/21
研討會日期 : 2014-10-21
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Stacey Chen
主持人 : Professor Hanjoon Jung
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Professor Chen received her Ph.D. in Economics from University of Rochester in 2002. She is currently an Associate Research Fellow at Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica. Her research fields are Labor, Health, Education and Econometrics.
演講摘要 : Parents preferring sons tend to go on to have more children until one or more boys are born, and to concentrate investment in boys for a given sibsize. Therefore, having a brother may affect child outcomes in two ways: indirectly, by decreasing sibsize, and directly, where sibsize remains constant. We develop an identification strategy that allows us to separate these two effects. We then apply this to capture the heterogeneous effects of male siblings in both direct and indirect channels, using 0.8 million Taiwanese first-borns. Our empirical evidence indicates that neither effect is important in explaining first-born boys' education levels. In contrast, both effects for first-born girls are evident but go in opposite directions, resulting in a near-zero total effect which has previously been a measure of gender bias. These results offer new evidence of sibling rivalry and gender bias in family settings that has not been detected in the literature.
