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The Effect of Sibship Size on Children’s Outcomes: Evidence from Vietnam

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Abstract

The child quality-quantity debate pays extensive attention to the effect of sibship size on education, but less is known about other outcomes of children such as health and labor. In this study, we estimate the effect of sibship size on various outcomes of children including disability, education and the labor supply of children in Vietnam. We do not find significant effects of sibship size on disability and working status of children. However, we find that having an additional sibling increases the risk of dropping out of school. More specifically, having an additional sibling reduces the probability of schooling of the first-born children by 1.6 percentage points in families with at least a child. This effect is increasing to around 3.0 percentage points in families with at least three children. The effect of sibship size on the number of completed grades is also higher and more significant in large families.

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Notes

  1. The two-child policy was strictly applied to civil servants and worker sin the public sector. People who violated the policy were not promoted and received a wage reduction (Pham et al. 2012).

  2. UNFPA has assisted in testing, piloting, training and monitoring the survey process, including the design of the questionnaires,

  3. According our estimates from the 2009 VHPC, Vietnam consists of 54 ethnic groups, in which Kinh or Vietnamese accounts for 85% of the total population. Compared with ethnic minorities, Kinh people have higher income and living standards (e.g., Lanjouw et al. 2017).

  4. We used command ivreg2 in Stata to estimate the 2SLS regression and performance tests. As a rule of thumb, if a F- statistic is under 10, the instruments might be weak (Staiger and Stock 1997).

  5. We also tried the two instruments (twins and sex of the firstborn) in the regressions with interactions. It means that instruments for interactions between sibship size and individual characteristics are interactions between the two instruments and individual characteristics. The estimation results are similar to those using one instrument of twins. Therefore, we report the estimates using one instrument ‘presence of twins’.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Leonard Cheshire Disability and Inclusive Development Centre, University College London, London, UK

    Daniel Mont

  2. Informetrics Research Group, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

    Cuong Viet Nguyen

  3. Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

    Cuong Viet Nguyen

  4. Indiana University Bloomington, 1315 E. 2nd St, R. 410J, Bloomington, IN, 47405, USA

    Anh Tran

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  1. Daniel Mont
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Appendix

Appendix

Table 7 Summary statistics of independent variables
Full size table
Table 8 OLS regression of children’s outcomes on sibship size: sample of the first-born children
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Table 9 OLS regression of children’s outcomes on sibship size: sample of the first-born and second-born children
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Table 10 OLS regression of children’s outcomes on sibship size: sample of the first-born, second-born and third-born children
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Table 11 OLS first-stage regressions of sibship size
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Mont, D., Nguyen, C.V. & Tran, A. The Effect of Sibship Size on Children’s Outcomes: Evidence from Vietnam. Child Ind Res 13, 147–173 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-019-09673-z

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