Full Citation

Title: The Heterogeneous Impact of the Quantity-Quality Tradeoff: Looking Beyond the Mean

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2011

ISBN:

ISSN:

DOI:

NSFID:

PMCID:

PMID:

Abstract: Since parents have limited resources, they face a tradeoff between the quantity and quality of their children the more children they have, the fewer resources they can allocate to each. Since Becker first introduced this Quantity-Quality model in 1960, a number of studies have attempted to verify it through empirical analysis. One difficulty is that parents choose both the number of children and resource allocation, so there can be omitted variables influencing both decisions, making it difficult to identify causal effects. In order to avoid this omitted variables bias, I use the exogenous differences in family size generated by parents preferences for having both boys and girls. Because parents tend to want children of both genders, they are more likely to have a third child when their first two children are the same gender. I focus on the impact of the Quantity-Quality tradeoff on resource allocation by using the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Censuses to study the effect of number of children on whether children attend private school. This paper contributes to the existing literature by analyzing the heterogeneous impact of the Quantity-Quality tradeoff across different demographic groups. The most significant result is found in the difference between boys to girls while an increase in the number of children from two to three decreased boys probability of attending private school by 5.0 percentage points, there was no similar effect for girls. Heterogeneous results were also found by childs age, age difference between the first two children, and region of the country.

User Submitted?: No

Authors: Hedrich, Jessica P.

Institution: University of Notre Dame

Department: Economics

Advisor: William Evans

Degree: Master of Arts

Publisher Location: South Bend, IN

Pages:

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Education, Family and Marriage

Countries: