The Effect of Sibling Size on Children’s Health and Education: Is there a Quantity-Quality Trade-off?
利用中国独生子女政策严格程度的地域差异作为工具变量，研究发现兄弟姐妹数量增加会损害儿童健康，但对教育无显著影响，支持资源稀释假说。
The quantity-quality trade-off is one important motivation for the family planning policies in many developing countries. In this paper, we examine the effect of number of siblings on children’s health and education in China. We find evidence of quantity-quality trade-off in children’s health but not in children’s education. Our study has three contributions. First, we focus not only on children’s education but also on children’s health, which has received rather little attention in the literature. Secondly, we use a new source of exogenous variation in fertility – variations of the strictness of the One-Child policy across localities in China – to construct instrumental variable's (IV's). Finally, we empirically explore the underlying mechanism of the quantity-quality trade-off, and find supporting evidence for the resource dilution hypothesis.