On the Production of Skills and the Birth-Order Effect
研究发现，父母对不同出生顺序子女的投资差异可以解释一半以上的认知技能差距，解释了为何头胎子女在认知测试、工资和教育成就上表现更优。
First-born children tend to outperform their younger siblings on measures such as cognitive exams, wages, educational attainment, and employment. Using a framework similar to Cunha and Heckman (2008) and Cunha, Heckman, and Schennach (2010), this paper finds that differences in parents' investments across siblings can account for more than one-half of the gap in cognitive skills among siblings. The study's framework accommodates for endogeneity in parents' investments, measurement error, missing observations, and dynamic impacts of parental investments.