IMPACT OF SIBSHIP SIZE, BIRTH ORDER, AND SEX COMPOSITION ON SCHOOL ENROLLMENT IN URBAN TURKEY

This paper investigates the effects of sibship size, birth order and sibling sex composition on children’s school enrollment in urban Turkey. Moreover, we examine how the effects of these variables vary by household income and the gender of the children. We utilize an instrumental variables estimation method in order to address parents’ joint fertility and schooling decisions where we use twin-births as instruments. In addition, we generate careful measures for birth order and siblings’ sex composition in order to purge the impact of these variables from that of sibship size. We find no causal impact of sibship size on school enrollment. However, there is evidence for a parabolic impact of birth-order where middle-born children fare worse. The parabolic impact of birth order is more pronounced in poorer families. Sex composition of siblings matters only for female children. A higher fraction of older male siblings decreases the enrollment probability of female children in poorer households. In the wealthiest families, on the contrary, a higher fraction of male siblings increases the enrollment probability of female children. The finding that birth order and sibling sex composition matters more for poorer households suggests that scarce financial resources are the underlying cause of the sibling composition effects.