The importance of being earliest: birth order and educational outcomes along the socioeconomic ladder in Mexico

Lucio Esposito; Sunil Mitra Kumar; Adrian Villasenor-Lopez

doi:10.1007/s00148-019-00764-3

The importance of being earliest: birth order and educational outcomes along the socioeconomic ladder in Mexico

Lucio Esposito, Sunil Mitra Kumar, Adrian Villasenor-Lopez

Environment and Geography

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Abstract

We study the effect of birth order on educational outcomes in Mexico using 2 million observations from the 2010 Census. We find that the effect of birth order is negative, and a variety of endogeneity and robustness checks suggest a causal interpretation of this finding. We then examine whether these effects vary across households’ economic status, and we find significant heterogeneity across absolute as well as relative standards of living, operationalized as household wealth and relative deprivation. Finally, we find that firstborns’ advantage is amplified when they are male, and in particular when other siblings are female.

Original language	English
Number of pages	31
Journal	Journal of Population Economics
Early online date	10 Jan 2020
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-019-00764-3
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 10 Jan 2020

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10.1007/s00148-019-00764-3

The importance of being earliest: birth order and educational outcomes along the socioeconomic ladder in Mexico
© The Author(s) 2020
Final published version, 788 KBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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abstract = "We study the effect of birth order on educational outcomes in Mexico using 2 million observations from the 2010 Census. We find that the effect of birth order is negative, and a variety of endogeneity and robustness checks suggest a causal interpretation of this finding. We then examine whether these effects vary across households{\textquoteright} economic status, and we find significant heterogeneity across absolute as well as relative standards of living, operationalized as household wealth and relative deprivation. Finally, we find that firstborns{\textquoteright} advantage is amplified when they are male, and in particular when other siblings are female.",

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