The Effect of Sibling's Gender on Earnings, Education and Family Formation

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractWe examine how the gender of a sibling affects earnings, education and family formation.Identification is complicated by parental preferences: if parents prefer certain sex compositions over others, children's gender affects not only the outcomes of other children but also the very existence of potential additional children. We address this problem by looking at dizygotic twins.In these cases, the two children are born at the same time, so parents cannot make decisions about one twin based on the gender of the other twin.We find that the gender of the sibling influences both men and women, but in a different way.Men with brothers earn more and are more likely to get married and have children than men with sisters. Women with sisters obtain lower education and give birth earlier than women with brothers. Our analysis shows that the family size channel cannot explain the findings. Instead, the most likely explanation is that siblings affect each other via various social mechanisms.

Biology and the Gender Gap in Educational Performance: The Role of Prenatal Testosterone in Test Scores

“…The full estimation results are available in Appendix TablesA4 and A5.26 It does not matter whether the first born is a boy or a girl, as we find a similar pattern when estimating the model for second borns (results available on request).27 This is consistent withPeter et al (2018) who find no effect of sibling gender on years of schooling for regular siblings and close siblings (defined as birth dates within 24 months). They do find an effect of sibling gender on years of schooling for dizygotic twins (i.e.…”

“…The third assumption stresses that the gender of the co-twin does not influence educational outcomes in any way other than through the prenatal testosterone transfer. This assumption is likely violated as growing up with a brother is different from growing up with a sister, and any such socialization effects resulting from gender-specific parent and/or sibling interactions might also cause the sibling's gender to potentially affect educational outcomes (Peter et al, 2018). 10 To control for this, we define a control group of closely spaced singletons (CSS), consisting of singletons who have a sibling born within 12 months of their own birth date.…”

“…Preferably we would want to distinguish between monozygotic and dizygotic twins (see e.g. Peter et al, 2018), but unfortunately our data does not include information on zygocity. We have to rely (like most other twin studies) on the equal environments assumption (EEA), which states that there are no systematic differences in the environments in which identical and fraternal twins are being raised.…”

“…31 Socialization effects are stressed as important in a related study by Peter et al (2018). in life.…”

The Effect of Childhood Family Size on Fertility in Adulthood: New Evidence From IV Estimation

“…In order to estimate only the direct effect of sibship sex composition on fertility in adulthood, i.e., net of effects running through sibship size, one needs to look at a situation or sample where sex composition does not influence sibship size (as is done for instance by Angrist et al (2010); Peter et al (2014)). In Section 6 we provide an empirical investigation of direct effects of sibling sex composition, utilizing the fact that the third child's sex does not affect the probability of further childbearing in families where the two firstborn children are of opposite sex.…”