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The Changing Impact of Family Size on Adolescents’ Schooling: Assessing the Exogenous Variation in Fertility Using Twins in Brazil

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Demography

Abstract

Researchers have long been interested in the influence of family size on children’s educational outcomes. Simply put, theories have suggested that resources are diluted within families that have more children. Although the empirical literature on developed countries has generally confirmed the theoretical prediction that family size is negatively related to children’s education, studies focusing on developing societies have reported heterogeneity in this association. Recent studies addressing the endogeneity between family size and children’s education have also cast doubt on the homogeneity of the negative role of family size on children’s education. The goal of this study is to examine the causal effect of family size on children’s education in Brazil over a 30-year period marked by important social and demographic change, and across extremely different regions within the country. We implement a twin birth instrumental variable approach to the nationally representative 1977–2009 PNAD data. Our results suggest an effect of family size on education that is not uniform throughout a period of significant social, economic, and demographic change. Rather, the causal effect of family size on adolescents’ schooling resembles a gradient that ranges from positive to no effect, trending to negative.

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Notes

  1. We use the terms family size, sibship size, and number of siblings synonymously.

  2. Economic theory also posits a negative association while contending that parents invest in their children based on assessments of children’s differential ability to contribute to the wealth of the entire family, therefore generating inequities within siblings (Becker 1981). Confluence theory predicts a negative effect of family size on children’s education, suggesting that the mechanism lowering per-child education in larger families is the family’s average intellectual environment (Zajonc and Markus 1975).

  3. Guo and VanWey (1999) were the first to use sibling fixed-effect models to handle the endogeneity resulting from parents with lower cognitive abilities having larger families. They found that the effects of family size on education disappear. Although this approach focuses on the bias from parents’ preferences given their education, it does not handle the endogeneity resulting from parents adjusting their fertility in response to desired children’s education.

  4. For excellent reviews, see Buchman and Hannum (2001) and Powell et al. (2004).

  5. While researchers cannot assert that couples have complete control over their childbearing, the use of contraception and reports on desired family sizes provide an idea of the extent to which limiting family size is in couples’ agenda.

  6. Because of the inexistence of panel data on education in Brazil to follow the same sample as it ages, we follow a nationally representative cohort at ages 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 using the PNAD data (available from authors upon request). The repeated cross sections allow for examining the educational distribution of a cohort as it ages. We find that while the distribution of education as a cohort ages yields higher means of completed schooling, it also produces larger standard deviations.

  7. Fertility treatments became accessible in Brazil in the late 1990s (Borlot and Trindade 2004). Being precise about the number of fertility clinics and procedures is impossible because no specific legislation regulates the practice. The Latin American Registry System (Registro Latinoamericano de Reproducción Asistida)—a surveillance system covering more than 90 % of the centers offering such technologies in Latin America—estimates that the entire region has nearly 90 clinics (Zegers-Hochschild 2002). A report from the World Health Organization estimates that 6,480 live births were produced via reproductive techniques in the region from 1991 to 1998 (Zegers-Hochschild 2002). It is estimated that Brazil shares 42.9 % of the cases, which yields 308 cases per year during this eight-year period. Based on the Demographic and Health Surveys report of 3,495,249 live births in Brazil in 1996 (Macro International 1996), we roughly estimate that 0.000088 of these births could have been produced through a fertility technology treatment, a small enough proportion not to significantly affect our analysis.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Grant 5 R24 HD042849 awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Health and Child Development. Souza gratefully acknowledges financial support from the International Training Program in Population Health funded by the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health. We are grateful to Eduardo Rios-Neto, Robert Hummer, Kelly Raley, the participants of the Education and Transitions to Adulthood Group at the University of Texas at Austin, three anonymous reviewers, and one deputy editor and the Editor of Demography for helpful comments.

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  1. Population Research Center and Department of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin, 1800 Main Building, Austin, TX, 78712, USA

    Letícia J. Marteleto

  2. Center for Demography and Ecology and Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Madison, USA

    Laetícia R. de Souza

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  1. Letícia J. Marteleto
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Correspondence to Letícia J. Marteleto.

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Marteleto, L.J., de Souza, L.R. The Changing Impact of Family Size on Adolescents’ Schooling: Assessing the Exogenous Variation in Fertility Using Twins in Brazil. Demography 49, 1453–1477 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-012-0118-8

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