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The effect of sibship size on educational attainment of the first born: evidence from three decennial censuses of Taiwan

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Abstract

There exists extensive literature analyzing the effect of sibship size and a child’s educational attainment, termed the quantity-quality (QQ) trade-off. Studies using data from developed countries tend to find limited or nonexistent effects, while studies that use data from developing countries find a wide range of relationships. We study a possible explanation for these seemingly contradictory findings that the existence or non-existence of a QQ trade-off is correlated with the socioeconomic context within which the family resides. We use the census files comprised of the entire Taiwan population in the years 1980, 1990, and 2000, reflecting different levels of economic growth across time, coupled with an instrumental variable approach and more than 7000 village fixed effects. Our results indicate that sibship size has large and significant effects on educational outcomes, measured in terms of high school and college enrollments, for early birth cohorts, and the effects diminish for more recent birth cohorts. In addition, we find that areas in different developmental stages face different QQ trade-offs: areas with higher levels of development only have trade-offs among higher measures of quality.

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Notes

  1. The year of school completed is used as an education outcome for the cohort born between 1968 and 1977, and dummy variables indicating whether one completes junior and senior high schools are used for the cohort born from 1978 to 1981.

  2. Due to industrialization and high technology development, the growth rates of these four areas exceeded seven percent a year between the early 1960s and 1990s.

  3. Progression rate for tier j is calculated as the number of graduates of tier j + 1 divided by the number of graduates of tier j.

  4. We do not focus on children between the ages of 7 and 15 (Oreopoulos et al. 2006) because grade repetition is not common in compulsory education in Taiwan.

  5. General colleges include both universities and 5-year vocational colleges.

  6. The compulsory education was extended from six years to nine years in 1968 in Taiwan, and those who were born in or after 1956 (aged 12 or under in 1968) are affected by the reform. Therefore, all of our studied cohorts are affected by this educational reform.

  7. We exclude twins at first birth to avoid the inherent difference between twins and singletons, and exclude twins at second birth to avoid the increase in number of children due to a twin birth. Twins at the first two births consist of 1.1%, 1.9%, and 1.7% of our study sample in waves 1980, 1990, and 2000, respectively.

  8. In Taiwan census, college students are still considered as living with their parents.

  9. According to National Statistics, Republic of China (Taiwan), the average ages at first marriage of married women (age ≥ 15) were 21.23, 21.88, and 22.71 in 1980, 1990 and 2000, respectively. The average ages at first birth of married women (age ≥ 15) were 22.47, 23.19, and 23.97 in 1980, 1990, and 2000, respectively (source: https://eng.stat.gov.tw/ct.asp?xItem=37195&CtNode=1662&mp=5).

  10. These percentages represent the high school enrollment rates for 16–17-year-olds and the college enrollment rates for 18–19-year-olds.

  11. Our first-stage results are greater than that based on the US and Israeli censuses (Angrist and Evans 1998; Angrist et al. 2010), which are 0.06–0.07 and 0.073, respectively.

  12. The proportions for son preference are 45%, 27%, and 12% in 1979, 1992, and 2002, respectively. Those statistics are based on the Knowledge, Attitudes and the Practice of Contraceptives surveys, 1973–1998 and 2002 National Survey on Knowledge, Attitudes and Practice of Health Promotion. We chose the survey years that are closest to the census years.

  13. The proportions of women who are indifferent about the gender composition of their children are 8% in 1979, 22% in 1992, and 35% in 2002.

  14. These results are consistent with the earliest studies in the literature that also confirm this negative relationship (e.g., Hanushek 1992; Blake 1981; Featherman and Hauser 1978).

  15. The median number of households in each township/district is 1458, 3310, and 3449 in 1980, 1990, and 2000, respectively.

  16. The measurement of educational attainment used is school enrollment in Qian (2018), educational level in Maralani (2008), and age-standardized schooling index in Rosenzweig and Wolpin (1980).

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Funding

This study was not funded by any institution.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Politics and Economics, Nanjing Audit University, 86 West Yushan Road, Pukou District, Nanjing, 211815, Jiangsu, China

    Cheng Chen

  2. Department of Economics and Business, Moravian College, Bethlehem, USA

    Sabrina Terrizzi

  3. Department of Economics, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, USA

    Shin-Yi Chou

  4. Department of Public Finance, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Hsien-Ming Lien

Authors
  1. Cheng Chen
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  2. Sabrina Terrizzi
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  3. Shin-Yi Chou
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  4. Hsien-Ming Lien
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Correspondence to Cheng Chen.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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We thank participants at the 2016 International Symposium on Human Capital and Labor Markets and the 2018 China Labor Economists Forum for their insights and suggestions on this work. All errors are our own.

Appendix

Appendix

See Figs. 2, 3, 4.

Fig. 2
figure 2

Source: World Bank (https://tradingeconomics.com)

Taiwan’s GDP from 1980 to 2000.

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Fig. 3
figure 3

Source: University of Pennsylvania (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PGDPUSTWA621NUPN)

Purchasing Power Parity Converted GDP Per Capita Relative to the United States, G-K Method, at Current Prices for Taiwan (US = 100).

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Fig. 4
figure 4

Source: Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, Executive Yuan (https://ceicdata.com/en/taiwan/consumer-price-index-2001,100/cpi-education-and-entertainment-tuition-and-miscellaneous-fees)

Taiwan’s CPI: Education and Entertainment: Tuition and Miscellaneous Fees from 1981 to 2007 (Consumer Price Index: 2001 = 100).

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See Tables 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.

Table 7 Taiwan’s Per Capita Annual Disposable Income of Rural and Urban Areas (NTD, New Taiwan Dollar).
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Table 8 Taiwan’s Education Progression Rates of Various Tiers (%).
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Table 9 Children used in the analysis. Table entries are number of observations meeting selection criteria
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Table 10 The relationship between sex composition and parents’ background
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Table 11 2SLS estimates for low- and high-educated families
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Table 12 Robustness checks with varying age-at-first-birth windows
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Table 13 Examples of townships/districts in each level of urbanization
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Table 14 First-stage results of Table 6. The effects of sex composition of the first three children on number of children in three-plus families
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Chen, C., Terrizzi, S., Chou, SY. et al. The effect of sibship size on educational attainment of the first born: evidence from three decennial censuses of Taiwan. Empir Econ 61, 2173–2204 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-020-01930-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-020-01930-3

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