Three Essays on Family Issues and Children''s Education
Date Issued
2009
Date
2009
Author(s)
Chen, Yen-Chien
Abstract
This thesis includes three empirical studies on the effects of family issues on children’s college enrollment:hapter1: The Impact of Sibling Sex Composition on Women''s Educational Achievements: A Unique Natural Experiment by Twins Gender Shocksn 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 whether 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, and select twins at first birth as analysis subjects. 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 twin 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. This is the first paper which investigates the sibling gender effect by twinning shock. 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.hapter2: Separate Effects of Sibling Gender and Family Size on Educational Achievements – Method and First Evidence from Population Birth Registryecause family size is endogenous and causally depends on the sex composition of early-born children, controlling for family size causes the estimated (total) sibling gender effect to include the direct effect, and the indirect effect mediated through family size. Therefore, previous evidence on sibling gender effect has not been well-identified. We show that separating the direct effect of sibling sex composition from the effects of family size requires an instrumental variable for family size, even if child gender and family size are both exogenous. By using a unique administrative data from Taiwan, we demonstrate how Instrumental- Variable Methods provide a way to resolve the problems of endogeneity and causal dependence of an important covariate (family size) on treatment status (the sex of the subject''s subsequent sibling). For the purpose of this study, we construct a panel data of families using Birth Registry of the entire Taiwan and match it with College Entrance Tests records to obtain children''s college attainment. This unique data provides accurate measures of educational outcomes, complete family size, and sibling sex composition. We minimize the incident of sex-selective abortion by focusing our analysis on cohorts who were born prior to abortion legalization and prior to widespread of technology for prenatal sex determination. We use the occurrence of twining at the second birth to instrument for family size, after controlling for birth weight residues. Our estimates show that neither sibling gender nor family size matter, except for firstborn girls who were born in the earliest year in our data, 1978, and the effects are small. After 1978, both effects are nearly zero.hapter 3: The Impact of Unexpected Maternal Death on Education -- First Evidence from Three National Administrative Data Linkshe death of parents is one of the most traumatic events for school-aged children. It can have a long- lasting effect on a child''s cognitive ability and socio-emotional development. However, because of data limitations and unobserved parental factors, including unobserved pre- existing health conditions prior to the actual death, the there is little existing evidence of any causal link between parental deaths and children''s educational outcomes is little. Based on an unique data set, which is constructed by linking three national administrative datasets -- the Birth Registry, Death Registry and College Entrance Tests’ records from Taiwan--, we can exploit unexpected parental deaths in a family fixed-effects model in order to compare the difference in education between siblings who lost parents unexpectedly before versus after the age of 18. Our empirical strategies can remove the most of the problems caused by unobserved characteristics. We find that losing a mother has a strong impact on a child''s possibility of entering college, while losing a father has no significant impact. Consistent with the suggestion in Behrman (1999), our evidence implies that a mother''s role of in child rearing a child has a stronger impact on a child''s outcome, than a father''s role as bread winner.
Subjects
Children’s education
son preference
sex selection abortion
within-family resource allocation
sibling rivalry effect (sibling gender effect)
family size effect
parental unexpected death
Type
thesis
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