Conley, Dalton, and Rebecca Glauber. 2006. “Parental Educational Investment and Children’s Academic Risk: Estimates of the Impact of Sibship Size and Birth Order from Exogenous Variation in Fertility.” Journal of Human Resources 41(4): 722–737.
This study uses exogenous variation in sibling sex composition to estimate the causal effect of sibship size on boys’ probabilities of private school attendance and grade retention. Using the 1990 U.S. Census, we find that for second-born boys, increased sibship size reduces the likelihood of private school attendance by six percentage points and increases grade retention by almost one percentage point. Sibship size has no effect for first-born boys. Instrumental variable estimates are largely consistent across racial groups, although the standard errors are larger for nonwhites as they have smaller sample sizes and this renders them insignificant at traditional alpha levels.
Dalton Conley is a University Professor at New York University and Director of NYU’s Center for Advanced Social Science Research (CASSR). He is also Adjunct Professor of Community Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Rebecca Glauber is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at New York University. The authors thank Jonathan Gruber, Joshua Angrist, and other participants at the 2005 NBER Summer Institute as well as participants at the 2003 IRP Summer Institute and two anonymous reviewers. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 9983636 and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation under Grant No. 038651. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning March 2007 through February 2010 from Dalton Conley, 295 Lafayette Street, Department of Sociology, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10012, <dalton.conley@nyu.edu>.