Abstract
We study the intergenerational effect of birth order on educational attainment using rich data from different European countries included in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The survey allows us to link two or more generations in different countries. We use reduced-form models linking children’s education to parents’ education, controlling for a large number of characteristics measured at different points in time. We find that not only are parents who are themselves firstborns better educated, on average, but they also have more-educated children compared with laterborn parents (intergenerational effect). Results are stronger for mothers than for fathers, and for daughters than for sons. In terms of heterogeneous effects, we find that girls born to firstborn mothers have higher educational attainment than girls born to laterborn mothers. We do not find evidence for potential channels other than parental education that could explain the intergenerational effect of parental birth order.
Highlights
Does being a firstborn child matter for outcomes later in life? The evidence we have to date shows that this is the case
We study the intergenerational effect of birth order on educational attainment using rich data from different European countries included in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE)
We find that being a firstborn parent increases the education attainment by 0.343 years in column 1 to 0.321 years in column 3, with the full list of controls
Summary
Does being a firstborn child matter for outcomes later in life? The evidence we have to date shows that this is the case. SHARE respondents who have children (“parents”) are asked to provide information on their offspring, including demographic characteristics (birth year, gender, whether they are biological children or not), their highest education attainment based on the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) framework, at the time of the interview regardless of where their children live This is an added value of our data, as most available studies that analyze intergenerational mobility usually observe only cohabiting children (Oreopoulos et al 2006).. In the paper closest to ours that uses data from SHARE for related but different purposes, Bertoni and Brunello (2016) study the effect of birth order on earnings using the sample of SHARE respondents from eleven countries From us, they only look at males and do not consider any intergenerational links.
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