Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Goh, Chor-ching

Titel

Family, schooling and earnings: An empirical investigation for Malaysia

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

1999

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Economists and policy-makers have long been concerned that households with more children might invest less human capital in them due to resource constraint. A large number of empirical studies using straightforward regressions have found a negative relationship between the number of children and their outcome measures (e.g., test scores, health). However, one cannot infer from these robust negative estimates that having a larger number of children causes their lower human capital. An appropriate approach is the Instrumental Variable strategy. This paper employs two new instruments to investigate the causal impact of the number of children on their educational attainment. The first instrument is based on the gender composition of children; it exploits the widely observed phenomenon that parents prefer a boy and a girl to either two girls or two boys. Parents tend to have a third birth if their first two are of the same gender. The second instrument uses the fact that actual number of births depends on a couple's biological fecundity. Sub-fertile couples are likely to have fewer children than they desire. I find that the average impact on children's educational attainment differs by family size. There is no evidence of a tradeoff among the small households with fewer than four children; however, there is indication of a quantity/quality tradeoff among the larger families.