PhD seminar: Claire Ricard

Birth order, skills, education and labour market outcomes in Madagascar

Discussants : Simone Bertoli et Hugues Champeaux

Abstract

Applying  family-type  fixed  effects  to  the  2012  Madagasacar  Youth  Transition  Sur-vey’s data, we examine the effect of birth order on non-cognitive and cognitive skills,education and labour market outcomes.   We find that firstborns are more likely to befixed-wage workers and show more spirit of initiative than their younger siblings.  Wedo not find any effect of birth order on other measures of personality. The effect of birthorder on cognition and education depends greatly on parent’s educational level.  Thereis no difference in school attainment for children whose none or only one parent has aprimary education.  On the contrary, when both parents have at least a primary educa-tion, they invest less in their later borns’ schooling.  The negative effect of birth orderon education is common in developed countries.  In the context of Madagascar, we canimagine that first children need more investments in their schooling to play the role of asafety net for the whole family once they enter the labour market.

Read the paper