Abstract

This article introduces a framework to study parental investments in the presence of birth order preferences and/or human capital cost differentials across children. The framework yields canonical models as special cases and delivers sharp testable predictions concerning how parental investments respond to an exogenous change in family size in the presence of birth order effects. These predictions characterize a generalised quantity–quality trade-off. Danish administrative data confirm our theory’s predictions. We find that for any given parity, the human capital profile of children in smaller families dominates that of large families, and that the average child’s education decreases as family size increases, even after taking birth order effects into consideration.

中文翻译：

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教育程度，出生顺序和家庭规模

摘要

本文介绍了一个框架，用于研究存在孩子出生顺序偏好和/或人力资本成本差异的父母投资。该框架产生了特殊情况下的规范模型，并提供了关于父母的投资在存在出生顺序影响的情况下如何应对家庭规模的外源性变化的清晰可测的预测。这些预测表征了一般的数量-质量折衷。丹麦的行政数据证实了我们理论的预测。我们发现，对于任何给定的平价，较小家庭中儿童的人力资本状况都比大型家庭中的人力资本状况更为重要，并且即使考虑了出生顺序的影响，随着家庭规模的增加，平均儿童的受教育程度也会下降。