Sibship Size and Educational Attainment: Evidence of Cohort Trends from 26 Low-Fertility Countries

Abstract

Children with many siblings have lower average educational attainment compared to children raised in smaller families. This disadvantage by sibship size has been observed across many different countries. We know remarkable little, however, about how sibship size disadvantage has changed over time within countries and how such trends vary between countries. Using comparative data from 114 surveys from 26 low-fertility countries, we find an increase of the sibsize disadvantage over time in the majority of countries: between the 1931-40 birth cohort and the 1971-80 birth cohort, 16 out of 26 countries showed a statistically significant increase in the sibship size disadvantage in education, while only two countries -Australia and the UKshowed a statistically measurable reduction in the sibship size disadvantage. In many countries, growing differential fertility by parental education played a substantial role in the increasing disadvantage. We discuss possible explanations and implications of the increased disadvantages and the variation in trends and levels between regions and specific countries.

The Additive Advantage of Having Educated Grandfathers for Children’s Education: Evidence from a Cross-National Sample in Europe

“…The resource dilution argument has originally been made for parental resources and educational attainment of children, positing that where limited parental resources have to divided among more siblings each child receives less (Blake 1986). There is a substantial literature on the correlation between sibship size and socioeconomic outcomes (see for instance Gibbs et al (2016)) While a negative association is found across high income countries and across birth cohorts (Choi et al 2017), there is debate to what extent this association reflects a causal effect of sibship size and to what extent it reflects selective fertility (Black et al 2005;Steelman et al 2002;Angrist et al 2010).…”