Kantarevic, Jasmin, and Stéphane Mechoulan. 2006. “Birth Order, Educational Attainment, and Earnings: An Investigation Using the PSID.” Journal of Human Resources 41(4): 755–777.
We examine the implications of being early in the birth order, and whether a pattern exists within large families of falling then rising attainment with respect to birth order. Unlike other studies using U.S. data, we go beyond grade for age and look at racial differences. Drawing from OLS and fixed effects estimations, we find that being first-born confers a significant educational advantage that persists when considering earnings; being last-born confers none. These effects are significant for large Black families at the high school level, and for White families of any size at both high school and college levels.
Jasmin Kantarevic is a senior economist at the Ontario Medical Association and a research affiliate at the Institute for Labor Studies (IZA). Stéphane Mechoulan is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Toronto. The authors thank Gadi Barlevy, Chris Jepsen, Nancy Qian, Imran Rasul, seminar participants at the University of Toronto and UQAM, and two anonymous referees for valuable comments and suggestions. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning March 2007 through February 2010 from Jasmin Kantarevic, Ontario Medical Association, 525 University Ave, Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario, M5G 2K7 Canada, Jasmin_Kantarevic@OMA.ORG.