We Prefer Sons But Does It Matter
نویسندگان
چکیده
Highly imbalanced sex ratios suggest that Asian families prefer sons. This preference may be expressed as reduction in parental investment in daughters when a younger son is born. This study investigates the gender effect of a younger sibling on older daughter's schooling. We construct a unique dataset linking national administrative data on college entrance examinations (CET) to birth registry records for the entire population of Taiwan, tracing back all births given by each mother over a 17-years period. The degree of ``son-preference'' in Taiwan is extremely strong -the probability of a family having another child after having produced two girls is about 30 percentage points higher than the probability of having another child after having already produced two boys. Nevertheless, perhaps surprisingly, we find little evidence that the educational attainment of the eldest daughter is affected by sibling gender. On the contrary, average firstborns in mixed-gender dyads with college-educated mothers are more likely to attend college, although the corresponding effect on SAT scores are less clear. These findings suggest that parental preference for sons does not necessarily have an impact on children's education. Our results also show no effect of family size on educational attainment of the first-born. JEL Classification: I20, J13, J16, J24, O10, R20
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