Big Sisters
This paper models household investments in young children when parents and older siblings share caregiving responsibilities and when investments by older siblings contribute to young children's human capital accumulation. To test the predictio...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2020
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/384181603738785852/Big-Sisters http://hdl.handle.net/10986/34687 |
| Summary: | This paper models household investments
in young children when parents and older siblings share
caregiving responsibilities and when investments by older
siblings contribute to young children's human capital
accumulation. To test the predictions of the model, the
paper estimates the impact of having one older sister (as
opposed to one older brother) on early childhood development
in a sample of rural Kenyan households with otherwise
similar family structures. Older sibling gender is not
related to household structure, subsequent birth spacing, or
other observable characteristics, so the presence of an
older girl (as opposed to an older boy) is treated as
plausibly exogenous. Having an older sister rather than an
older brother improves younger siblings' vocabulary and
fine motor skills by more than 0.1 standard deviations.
Viewed through the lens of the model, the empirical pattern
shown here suggests that: (i) older siblings'
investments in young children contribute to their human
capital accumulation, and (ii) households perceive lower
returns to investing in older girls than in older boys. |
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