women s work sibling competition and children s school performance this research offers an interpretation of the relationship between fertility child spacing family resources and market work by mothers and the subsequent cognitive skills of grade schoolers as reported by their teachers first an approach to fertility as the outcome of a deliberate choice process is developed and then empirical evidence from a small panel of u s households first interviewed in 1975 76 when they had preschool children is presented in a 1981 82 reinterview a supplementary project was that of obtaining teacher ratings of school performance of individual children large family size as measured by the number of siblings of given age and sex in the household during preschool years in 1975 76 has an important negative impact on the child s subsequent grade school performance boy siblings in nearby age ranges have the most negative impact on performance while teenage siblings of either sex have no systematic adverse effect parental resources as measured by income education child care time and a mother s reduced market time are associated with greater cognitive skills and can offset the apparent disadvantage of having siblings in nearby age intervals there appears to be a significant tradeoff between a market career and a home career for women women who have more children spaced over wider age intervals and who devote more time to child care and less to market work presumably get more benefits from their home career in the form of enhanced child development on the other hand full time market work i e hours in the labor market for pay is important for earnings growth of the mother mary corcoran greg duncan and michael ponza 1983 and family income has a favorable effect on school performance so the apparent choices facing women are more equivocal

multiple experiments for the causal link between the quantity and quality of children this article presents evidence on the child quantity child quality trade off using quasi experimental variation due to twin births and preferences for a mixed sibling sex composition as well as ethnic differences in the effects of these variables our sample includes groups with very high fertility an innovation in our econometric approach is the juxtaposition of results from multiple instrumental variables strategies capturing the effects of fertility over different ranges for different sorts of people to increase precision we develop an estimator that combines different instrument sets across partially overlapping parity specific subsamples our results are remarkably consistent in showing no evidence of a quantity quality trade off

risk sharing by households within and across regions and industries abstract cochrane 1991 journal of political economy 99 957 976 and mace 1991 journal of political economy 99 928 956 test if risk sharing across households is complete in the sense that household consumption moves one for one with aggregate consumption in their studies the source of income risk is idiosyncratic and agents can share risk across the entire economy using a sample of households from the panel study on income dynamics psid we explore whether households share the risk associated with their industries and regions across households in other regions and industries we find that a large fraction of risk faced by households is not shared across regions and industries

class size education and wages we use micro data for england and wales to examine the effects of class size on the decision to stay on in full time schooling at 16 and on wages later in life we find that class size has a sizeable and significant effect on the decision to stay on this finding is very robust wage equations show the effect of staying on is significantly positive for wages combining this with the effect of class size on the staying on decision reveals that class size significantly affects future wages reduced form models lead to much less accurate and insignificant estimates

cheap children and the persistence of poverty this paper develops a theory of fertility that offers an explanation for the persistence of poverty within and across countries if educated individuals have a comparative advantage in raising educated children then parental fertility choice is shown to give rise to a poverty trap in which the poor choose high fertility rates with low investment in child quality moreover the impact of child quality choice on economic performance is amplified by the diluting effect of higher fertility on physical capital accumulation the theory proposes insights regarding the effects of inequality globalisation and life expectancy on economic growth and demographic transitions this paper develops a theory of fertility and child educational choice that offers an explanation for the persistence of poverty within and across countries the joint determination of the quality education and quantity of children in a household is studied under the key assumption that individuals productivity as teachers increases with their own human capital in contrast the minimum time cost associated with raising a child regardless of the child s quality the quantity cost is not affected by parental education as a result the price of child quantity relative to the price of child quality increases with individuals wages in particular for low wage individuals for whom the opportunity cost of time is low children of minimal quality are cheap this assumption therefore generates a comparative advantage for the poor in child quantity whereas high wage educated individuals have a comparative advantage in raising quality children consistent with the well known evidence poor households thus choose relatively high fertility rates with relatively low investment in their offspring s education and therefore their offspring are poor as well in contrast high income families choose low fertility rates with high investment in education and therefore high income persists in the dynasty evidence from the us provided by hanushek 1992 suggests that a trade off between quantity and quality of children does indeed exist hanushek argues that movements in family size could explain over half the variance in some test scores and that the elasticity of achievements with respect to the number of children in the family is 0 03 implying that the annual achievement growth of each child in a family will fall about 2 when a second child is added and about 0 5 when a sixth child is added 1

the impact of parental income on early schooling transitions a re examination using data over three generations abstract this paper applies new semi parametric techniques to estimate the effects of parental income on the probability of being held back in elementary school in france we use information on grandparents past socioeconomic status and parents education level to separate the parental income effects from the effects of the unmeasured determinants of children s performance at school that are correlated with parental income when considering the probability of being held back in elementary school we find that the effects of parental poverty are much larger than the effects of a child s sex or age age within his her class or of the parents education level our findings suggest that policy decisions that increase income transfers to relatively poor families have a potentially very large impact on children s early performance at school

virtuous interactions in removing exclusion the link between foreign market access and access to education abstract we outline a methodology which aims to give an answer to the widespread demand of impact analyses by regulators or by funding agencies which need to evaluate the current and past performance of development projects and may lack time series evidence we devise a retrospective panel data approach to evaluate the dynamics of the effects of fair trade affiliation on the schooling decisions of a sample of thai organic rice producers across the past 20 years we find that the probability of school enrolment in families with more than two children is significantly affected by fair trade affiliation years we try to ascertain whether our finding is robust to endogeneity of producers choices of local cooperative affiliation and adoption of organic techniques the significant difference between pre and post fair trade affiliation performance documents that fair trade participation generates a significant break in the schooling decisions of affiliated households

ability transmission endogenous fertility and educational subsidy in this study we attempt to investigate how educational subsidy childcare allowance and family allowance affect economic growth and income distribution on the basis of simulation models which incorporate intergenerational ability transmission and endogenous fertility the simulation results show that financial support for higher education can both increase economic growth and reduce income inequality especially if the abilities of parent and child are closely correlated in contrast with educational subsidy raising childcare allowance or family allowance has limited impacts on growth and income inequality

parental compensatory behaviors and early child health outcomes in cebu philippines a dynamic optimization model of parents choosing investments in their children s health motivates an empirical model of parents choices of health inputs for their children and the impacts of these decisions on their children s subsequent health estimates of the child health input demand functions and the child health production functions from the cebu longitudinal health and nutrition survey accord with the prediction that optimizing behavior results in higher levels of aggregate child health observable parental behaviors respond to the physical developmental status of their children these parental responses appear to yield large and statistically significant improvements in children s early physiological outcomes however because some health inputs choices are not observable it is impossible to ascertain whether these measured effects are due solely to variations in the observed input choices

the value of children inter generational support fertility and human capital abstract this paper offers robust empirical evidence of a darwinian pro natalist mechanism parents can improve their old age support with an additional child using the incidence of first born twins as an instrument for fertility outcomes i find that chinese senior parents with more children receive more financial transfers and are more likely to co reside with an adult child they are also less likely to work past retirement age the estimated effects are large despite the evidence that adult children from larger families are less educated and earn significantly less interestingly the effect of an increase in the number of children on old age support does not depend on the child s gender

measuring investment in education historic debates about the measurement of capital are even more complicated in the case of education and human capital as extensive research demonstrates education resources are not consistently related to student performance in existing elementary and secondary schools this inefficiency in public schools implies that spending and resource measures do not accurately capture variations in school quality this finding then has clear implications for both education policy and economic research because school inputs are poor policy instruments an alternative policy focus that appears much more productive is performance incentives related to student achievement

the quality and distribution of teachers under the no child left behind act the heart of accountability under the no child left behind nclb act is an attempt to change the existing incentives in schools with the ultimate objective that all students meet a proficiency standard existing research indicates that nothing is more important to high achieve ment as having effective teachers implying that the impact of new incentives on teachers will be central to any consideration of the accountability statutes tracing the impacts of nclb on the stock and distribution of teachers is none theless a difficult and uncertain task the belief that the quality of teachers matters a great deal to the quality of education received by students has actually proven hard to substantiate and the reasons for this difficulty are key to assessing the impacts of no child left behind a substantial body of research going back to the coleman et al 1966 report has attempted to link commonly used measures of teacher quality such as experience degree level and state teacher certification to student outcomes surprisingly except for perhaps the first few years of classroom experience no robust connection has appeared for example hanushek and rivkin 2006 review various studies attempting to identify characteristics of effective teachers one

socially optimal social security and education subsidization in a dynastic model with human capital externalities fertility and endogenous growth abstract this paper considers socially optimal government policies in a dynastic family model with physical capital human capital endogenous fertility and positive spillovers from average human capital such spillovers reduce human capital investment but raise fertility from their social optimum we first characterize the social optimum with a non convex feasible set due to the quantity quality tradeoff concerning children we then show that social security and education subsidization together financed by labor income taxes can fully eliminate the efficiency losses of the spillovers and achieve the social optimum under plausible conditions however none of the policies can do so alone

examination performance in scottish secondary schools an ordered logit approach this paper analyses the determinants of educational outcomes for scottish secondary schools using an ordered logit model with data on school examination performance for pupils in the last year of compulsory education separate equations are estimated for 1993 1994 and 1998 1999 the empirical results in line with previous british studies underline the importance of family peer group and school influences in determining educational outcomes they cast doubt however on suggestions that there is an optimal size of school

chronic disease burden and the interaction of education fertility and growth abstract this study considers the eradication of hookworm disease from the american south circa 1910 as a test of the quantity quality q q framework of fertility eradication was principally a shock to the price of quality because of three factors hookworm i depresses the return to human capital investment ii had a very low case fatality rate and iii had negligible prevalence among adults consistent with the q q model we find a significant decline in fertility associated with eradication

corruption fertility and human capital abstract we build an overlapping generations model in which reproductive households face a child quantity child quality trade off and bureaucrats are delegated with the task of delivering public services that support the accumulation of human capital by integrating the theoretical analyses of endogenous growth corruption and fertility choices we show that the negative relation between fertility and economic development may also be affected by differences in the magnitude of bureaucratic corruption

education and ethnicity in canada an intergenerational perspective ethnic and intergenerational aspects of human capital investment are explored levels of and cross sectional returns to education across ethnic groups in canada are estimated and large differences observed for men a positive correlation exists between ethnic group average years of education and its return we also find large negative correlations between ethnic group average educational outcomes and the previous generation s fertility suggesting a role for home production as a complement to formal education and supporting models of child quantity quality trade offs very slow intergenerational convergence in ethnic group level educational and labor market outcomes is also observed

new evidence of the causal effect of family size on child quality in a developing country this paper presents new evidence of the causal effect of family size on child quality in a developing country context we estimate the impact of family size on child labor and educational outcomes among brazilian children and young adults by exploring the exogenous variation of family size driven by the presence of twins in the family using the brazilian census data for 1991 we find that the exogenous increase in family size is positively related to labor force participation for boys and girls and to household chores for young women we also find negative effects on educational outcomes for boys and girls and negative impacts on human capital formation for young female adults moreover we obtain suggestive evidence that credit and time constraints faced by poor families may explain the findings

structural change and the fertility transition this paper provides new insights into the relationship between structural change and the fertility transition we exploit the spread of an agricultural pest in the american south in the 1890s as pl

the early bird gets the worm birth order effects in a dynamic family model the great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life s essential unfairness nancy mitford http www quotegarden com family html i introduction birth order effects well established in both the academic and the popular psychology literature have received considerable attention in recent empirical economics studies for example ejrnaes and portner 2004 black devereux and salvanes 2005 conley and glauber 2006 and kantarevic and mechoulan 2006 find significant differences between firstborn and later born children in outcomes such as educational attainment and or earnings price 2008 finds differences in inputs in general the firstborn in the family is advantaged hanushek 1992 suggests that these differences arise because children of different birth order within the same family are born into different intellectual environments with later borns entering less stimulating environments price 2008 looks at quality time that parents spend with each child in multiple child families and finds that children of higher birth order receive less quality time with parents at any given age than do children of lower birth order at the same age zajonc 1976 suggests that older siblings partly replace parents in providing some of this quality time this benefits the firstborns because they have the opportunity to be teachers from an early age theoretical economic models of the family are typically atemporal when it comes to the decision of how much of the family s resources to devote to children and hence birth order effects do not emerge endogenously our article fills an important gap in the theoretical literature on families with children by explicit consideration of the temporal production of both the child s well being and its human capital and the influence of birth order on the production conditions for children who are close in age we show cases in which the firstborn receives more resources overall than the second so the second born never has higher utility than the firstborn at any stage proposition 1 in this case we can make clear predictions about outcomes as well as inputs and we would expect tests to reveal higher scores of the firstborn regardless of the age at which they are administered in other cases the mix of resources devoted to children differs with birth order with ambiguous predictions for outcomes at some ages propositions 2a and 3 or all ages see e g propositions 2b and 5 we investigate the trade off parents make between spending time with children and working for income to purchase consumption goods for family members we consider a three stage model of parental decision making a family has two children who are born sequentially older children have different needs than younger ones so the sequential nature of child rearing matters each child spends two periods with their parents the firstborn is a single child in its first period of life and an older sibling in its second and the second born is a younger sibling in its first period and the sole child in the household in its second thus each child spends one period with parents and a sibling and one period alone with its parents the children differ with respect to the sequencing of these two phases in the second period the presence of two children of different ages and with different needs but both requiring some supervision time raises the issue of economies of scope in childcare 1 is a given amount of parental childcare as productive if shared by two children rather than devoted to one there is little direct evidence on the nature of the home production function for child quality but mocan 1997 found evidence suggesting the existence of both scale and scope economies in the production functions for day care centers in the main body of the article we assume economies of scope for parents 2 parents care about both the contemporaneous utility of each child and their well being as adults we assume no societal or personal biases in favor of either child

birth order and risky adolescent behavior i introduction there is a widespread belief that birth order is an important determinant of personality intelligence and economic success this belief is supported by a number of recently published popular books each with its own approach to the topic leman 2001 16 18 for instance argues that firstborns are more highly motivated to achieve than later borns and as a consequence often fill positions of high authority or achievement in contrast wallace 1999 18 worries that firstborns go through life feeling like they cannot measure up to the high standards their parents expected lacking in confidence they might drop out and refuse to compete altogether 1 although there is an intuitive appeal to some of these theories the weight of evidence suggests that birth order effects of this nature either do not exist or are difficult to measure using the standard approaches of social scientists a large number of empirical studies have examined the effect of birth order on test scores education and earnings see olneck and bills 1979 blake 1981 hauser and sewell 1983 behrman and taubman 1986 kessler 1991 and hanushek 1992 taken together their results suggest that after properly controlling for family size birth order explains little variation in these conventional measures of success another more recent strand of research in this area examines whether the sex composition of an individual s siblings affects academic achievement as measured by years of education in a well known article butcher and case 1994 present evidence that females raised with brothers go on to receive more education on average than that of females raised with at least one sister however even this relatively modest albeit unexpected finding has been called into question by subsequent studies note kaestner 1997 and hauser and kuo 1998 using data on adolescents aged 12 through 17 we investigate the relationship between birth order and a number of behaviors that have been for the most part ignored in this literature these behaviors include the probability that an individual smoked cigarettes used substances such as marijuana or alcohol engaged in sexual activity or committed any one of a series of crimes in contrast to what most empirical studies have found we find strong evidence that birth order is related to many of the outcomes under study we also show that at least one birth order difference can last into early adulthood if not beyond although it is difficult to isolate the precise routes through which birth order affects the behavior of adolescents our results are consistent with the idea that peer influences play an important role ii why birth order effects might exist researchers working in this area have long speculated that birth order might be related to child outcomes through parental investments in their offspring becker and tomes 1976 posit a model in which parents devote more financial resources to children with lower innate ability 2 if as suggested by behrman and taubman 1986 and kessler 1991 genetic endowments favor earlier born children this model would predict offsetting financial investments in later borns under the assumption of imperfect capital markets birdsall 1991 predicts greater expenditures on later born children as family income rises and older siblings become financially independent but the author also notes that firstborns do not initially have to compete for their parents time and attention in a frequently cited piece in the psychology literature zajonc 1976 likewise emphasizes the early period in a firstborn s cognitive development when parental attention is undivided 3 in fact most researchers working on birth order issues have assumed that children are particularly sensitive to parental time investments and the home environment at young ages 4 however certain nonmonetary parental inputs such as monitoring and supervision may become increasingly important as a child matures especially in the determination of risky or delinquent behaviors

bargaining with endogenous deadlines we develop a two person negotiation model with complete information that makes endogenous both the deadline and the level of surplus destruction after the deadline we show that the undominated nash equilibrium outcome is always unique but might be inefficient moreover as the bargaining period becomes short or as the players become very patient the unique undominated nash equilibrium outcome is always inefficient

teacher training teacher quality and student achievement abstract we study the effects of various types of education and training on the productivity of teachers in promoting student achievement previous studies on the subject have been hampered by inadequate measures of teacher training and difficulties in addressing the non random selection of teachers to students and of teachers to training we address these issues by estimating models that include detailed measures of pre service and in service training a rich set of time varying covariates and student teacher and school fixed effects we find that elementary and middle school teacher productivity increases with experience informal on the job training the largest gains from experience occur in the first few years but we find continuing gains beyond the first five years of a teacher s career in contrast we do not find a consistent relationship between formal professional development training and teacher productivity however this may be partly driven by estimation issues as we find more significant positive effects of formal training in the subject grade combination where estimates should be most precise middle school math there is no evidence that teachers pre service undergraduate training or college entrance exam scores are related to productivity

children as income producing assets the case of teen illegitimacy and government transfers this paper develops a classical model of the teen fertility decision in the presence of public income transfers the theoretical model predicts that welfare payments will encourage fertility holding constant other economic opportunities and that better economic opportunities will discourage fertility considering the possible simultaneity of illegitimacy rates and benefit levels due to the collective choice process the authors confirm the theoretical models predictions with state level data from 1980 through 1990 the authors find that including fixed effects in the regression to control for unobserved differences between states does not sufficiently control for endogeneity after controlling for endogeneity real welfare benefits are strongly and robustly related to teen illegitimacy the point estimates of the elasticity with respect to changes in the illegitimacy rate are around 1 3 for white teens and 2 1 for black teens real wages for women with a high school education or less are negatively related to teen illegitimacy for white teens with an elasticity of around 0 4 finally male wages appear to have little effect on the illegitimacy rate for white teens but appear negatively correlated with the illegitimacy rate for black teens in some model specifications authors

black white achievement differences and governmental interventions the estimates in the study considered whether any of the governmental or family factors individually could explain the magnitude and pattern of black white achievement gaps neither the level nor the distribution of school spending appears to provide much explanation for the gaps school spending levels show little consistent impact with any indication of differential impact on blacks being small direct analyses of the effects of spending equalization on performance similarly show little impact on the other hand governmental intervention through integration programs appears potentially more important

the economics of schooling production and efficiency in public schools n recent years public and professional interest in schools has been heightened by a spate of reports many of them critical of current school policy these policy documents have added to persistent and long standing concerns about the cost effectiveness and fairness of the current school structure and have made schooling once again a serious public issue as in the past however any renewed interest in education is likely to be short lived doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in this frustration about school policy relates directly to knowledge about the educational production process and in turn to underlying research on schools although the educational process has been extensively researched clear policy prescriptions flowing from this research have been difficult to derive 2 there exists however a consistency to the research findings that does have an immediate application to school policy schools differ dramatically in quality

do birth order and family size matter for intergenerational income mobility evidence from sweden previous studies of intergenerational income mobility have not considered potential birth order or family size effects in the estimated income elasticity this article uses a large sample of individuals born between 1962 and 1964 income elasticities with respect to parents incomes are estimated for individuals with different birth order positions and family sizes results based on labour income and total income for sons and daughters are reported separately the elasticity tends to decrease with family size as well as with birth order for a given family size especially in the labour income analysis of fathers and sons

the trade off between child quantity and quality an empirical investigation of trade offs between number of children and their scholastic performance confirms that family size directly affects children s achievement though parents show no favori

fecundity fertility and the formation of human capital exploiting a genealogy of english individuals living in the 16th to the 19th centuries this study shows that lower parental reproductive capacity positively affected the socio economic achievements of offspring using the time interval between the date of marriage and the first birth as a measure of reproductive capacity we find that parental fecundity positively affected the number of siblings and that children of parents with lower fecundity were more likely to become literate and employed in skilled and high income professions this suggests there was a trade off between child quantity and quality in england during the industrial revolution supporting leading theories of the origins of modern economic growth

the failure of input based schooling policies in an effort to improve the quality of schools governments around the world have dramatically increased the resources devoted to them by concentrating on inputs and ignoring the incentives within schools the resources have yielded little in the way of general improvement in student achievement this paper provides a review of the us and international evidence on the effectiveness of such input policies it then contrasts the impact of resources with that of variations in teacher quality that are not systematically related to school resources finally alternative performance incentive policies are described

do peer groups matter peer group versus schooling effects on academic attainment this paper estimates an educational production function educational attainment is a function of peer group parental input and schooling conventional measures of school quality are not good predictors for academic attainment once we control for peer group effects parental qualities also have strong effects on academic attainment this academic attainment is a then a key determinant of subsequent labour market success as measured by earnings the main methodological innovation in this paper is the nomination of a set of instruments very broad regions of birth which as a whole pass close scrutiny for validity and permit unbiased estimation of the production function

parental altruism and the value of avoiding acute illness are kids worth more than parents abstract a model describing parents preferences to relieve their own and their children s acute illnesses is estimated using stated preference data estimated marginal rates of substitution mrs between child and parent illness are about two indicating that parents value children s illness attributes twice as highly as their own the mrs is larger for younger children falls toward unity as the child approaches adulthood and appears to reflect parental altruism rather than parent child differences in initial health or illness costs intra family allocations may compensate for chronic health impairments parents willingness to pay to avoid own or child illness increases with income declines with fertility increases at a decreasing rate with duration and number of symptoms and depends on perceived discomfort and activity restrictions current methods of assessing morbidity benefits of environmental regulations may understate substantially the value of children s health particularly in african american families

assessing school efficiency in portugal using fdh and bootstrapping this study explores a new data set that contains information both on inputs and outputs for a sample of portuguese secondary schools an fdh reference technology is used to determine radial technical efficiency scores and slacks although it is known that there is no reason to assume convexity in the study of education efficiency frontiers this is the first study ever to use fdh at the school level effectively relaxing the convexity assumption a two stage approach is used whereby the significant environmental variables that explain fdh efficiency scores and slacks are identified for the purpose of statistical inference the first application of the bootstrapping algorithms suggested by simar and wilson 2003 is conducted the study concludes that the unemployment rate access to health care services adult education and living infrastructures are determinants of school efficiency the differences between the coast and the interior of portugal seem to be more relevant as far as school efficiency is

occupational variation in quantity quality trade off in a brawn based economy the paper revisits the theory of the quantity quality trade off and demonstrates that the relationship between quantity and health of children is subject to occupational variation in physical energ

property rights for the poor effects of land titling secure property rights are considered a key determinant of economic development the evaluation of the causal effects of property rights however is a difficult task as their allocation is typically endogenous to overcome this identification problem we exploit a natural experiment in the allocation of land titles in 1981 squatters occupied a piece of land in a poor suburban area of buenos aires in 1984 a law was passed expropriating the former owners land to entitle the occupants some original owners accepted the government compensation while others disputed the compensation payment in the slow argentine courts these different decisions by the former owners generated an exogenous allocation of property rights across squatters using data from two surveys performed in 2003 and 2007 we find that entitled families substantially increased housing investment reduced household size and enhanced the education of their children relative to the control group these effects however did not take place through improvements in access to credit our results suggest that land titling can be an important tool for poverty reduction albeit not through the shortcut of credit access but through the slow channel of increased physical and human capital investment which should help to reduce poverty in future generations

beyond the quantity quality tradeoff population control policy and human capital investment abstract the quantity quality tradeoff theory implies that a reduction in fertility would induce more human capital investment per child and it is widely believed that population control policy could promote human capital levels in developing countries china s one child policy ocp has significantly reduced the fertility in the country and popular belief holds that this policy has contributed to the enhancement in china s human capital since 1979 however the quantity quality tradeoff dose not present the complete truth another crucial factor relates to which segment of the population is reduced a critical issue that has been ignored in the literature china s ocp is significantly more strictly implemented in urban areas than in rural areas where human capital investment in children is significantly lower this two tier ocp could have significantly increased the rural urban fertility ratio and brought about important consequences we first emphasize the importance of such a population compositional effect which may offset the potentially positive quantity quality tradeoff effect on human capital we present a simple analytic framework and quantify the relative sizes of the quantity quality tradeoff and compositional effects we find that the former is dominated by the latter and that the ocp has reduced the average human capital level of china s next generation by approximately 1 2 this novel evidence indicates that the conventional wisdom on population control may be incomplete and that its policy implications could be misleading

the effect of sibship size on educational attainment in china period variations in industrialized nations sibship size generally depresses educational attainment the larger the number of siblings the lower the educational attainment presumably because of the reduction of family resources both material and intellectual available to each child however this association is much less consistent in developing nations and there is some evidence of substantial change over time in this paper we study the effect of number of siblings on educational attainment in china a nation that has experienced sharp vacillations between policies designed to promote equality between urban and rural residents and between men and women and policies designed to promote economic development the implementation of these policies in the educational arena has alternately reduced and increased competition for educational resources and we show has correspondingly reduced and increased the effect of the number of children in a family on their educational attainment

children and their parents a review of fertility and causality childbearing decisions are not made in isolation they are taken in concert with decisions regarding work marriage health investments and stocks as well as many other observable and non observable considerations drawing causal inferences regarding the effect of additional children on family outcomes is complicated by these endogenous factors this paper lays out the issues involved in estimating the effect of additional child births on family outcomes and the assumptions underlying the range of estimators and methodologies proposed in the economic literature the common pitfalls of these estimators are discussed as well as their potential to bias our interpretation of the effect additional births have on children and parents both in the existing literature and in future work in the face of changing patterns of childbearing and child rearing

intra school competition and student achievement within the economics of education literature numerous studies have investigated the relationship between educational market competition and educational achievement educational market competition has been defined as either the availability of vouchers within a community or the number of schools or school districts within the relevant market structure while these studies have shown that increases in inter district competition result in increased student achievement no studies to our knowledge have yet investigated the effect of intra school competition on student achievement within this study a measure of intra school competition is developed and the findings indicate that increased intra school competition leads to increased student achievement

could do better the effectiveness of incentives and competition in schools this paper studies the eects of incentive mechanisms and of the competitive environment on the interaction between schools and stu dents in a set up where their eort aects the students educational attainment we show that increasing the power of the incentive scheme and the eectiveness of competition may have the counterintuitive ef fect of lowering the students attainment in a simple dynamic set up where the reputation of the schools aects recruitment we show that increased competition leads to segregation of pupils by ability

the twin instrument fertility and human capital investment twin births are often used as an instrument to address selection of women into fertility however recent work shows selection of women into twin birth such that while ols estimates tend to be downward biased twin iv estimates will tend to be upward biased this is pertinent given the emerging consensus that fertility has limited impacts on women s labour supply or on investments in children using data for developing countries and the united states to estimate the trade off between fertility and children s human capital we demonstrate the nature and size of the bias in the twin iv estimator and estimate bounds on the true parameter

the more the merrier the effect of family size and birth order on children s education there is an extensive theoretical literature that postulates a tradeoff between child quantity and quality within a family however there is little causal evidence that speaks to this theory using a rich dataset on the entire population of norway over an extended period of time we examine the effects of family size and birth order on the educational attainment of children while we find a negative correlation between family size and children s education when we include indicators for birth order and or use twin births as an instrument family size effects become negligible in addition birth order has a significant and large negative effect on children s education we also study adult earnings employment and teenage childbearing and find strong evidence for birth order effects with these outcomes particularly among women these findings suggest the need to revisit economic models of fertility and child production focusing not only on differences across families but differences within families as well

the impacts of family size on investment in child quality using multiple births as an exogenous shift in family size i investigate the impact of the number of children on child investment and child well being using data from the 1980 us census five percent public use micro sample 2sls results demonstrate that parents facing a change in family size reallocate resources in a way consistent with becker s quantity quality model a larger family generated by twins in a later birth reduces the likelihood that older children attend private school reduces the mother s labor force participation and increases the likelihood that parents divorce the impact of family size on a measure of child outcome such as grade retention is less clear the results indicate that for both measures of child investment and child well being the 2sls estimates are statistically distinguishable from ols estimates indicating an omitted variables bias in the single equation model

does the birth order affect the cognitive development of a child this article investigates the link between position in the birth order and early scholastic ability using matched mother child data from the national longitudinal survey of youth 1979 cohort nlsy79 i find that being the first born is beneficial even after controlling for nonlinear effects of family size and child characteristics the verbal ability of first borns is about one tenth of a sd higher than for children in the middle of the birth order there is no evidence that last borns fare better than intermediate children the first born advantage is confirmed by estimates from within family variation models and i argue that the findings are consistent with the resource dilution hypothesis

mne sme cooperation an integrative framework although international business scholars have begun to recognize the division of entrepreneurial labor between mnes and smes there is a fragmented understanding of the different forms mne sme cooperation can take we develop a typology that takes into account not only complementarity of capabilities but also crucially the compatibility of intent between mnes exploration vs exploitation and smes international vs domestic orientation the framework offers a novel way to understand the forms and dynamics of mne sme cooperation we also show how it can be applied more broadly by considering its application to societal challenges such as achieving the united nations sustainable development goals

quality adjusted measures of services in public schools abstract this study considers specification and estimation of cost functions in public schools a number of production characteristics are included in the specification to control for observable differences between municipalities in the provision of their school services both parametric and non parametric approaches are used to take into account the quality differences in school services these approaches are then compared to the alternative output measure without any adjustment for quality differences the sensitivity of different elasticities and returns to scale rts measures with respect to alternative model specifications and quality adjustments are also analyzed in the empirical section we examine performances of 286 swedish municipalities in the production of primary and secondary school education during the 1992 3 1994 5 school years