Summary: This article estimates the effect of the oldest sister's education on child human capital development. In many developing countries, the oldest sisters share significant childcare responsibilities in the household and can influence younger siblings' learning. The author proposes a model that predicts competing effects of increasing the oldest sister's schooling on younger sibling human capital. Using an identification strategy that exploits the gender segregation of schools in Pakistan, she finds that the oldest sister's schooling significantly improves younger brothers' literacy, numeracy and schooling. These results indicate that evaluations of programmes targeting girls' education that ignore these spillovers on younger siblings systematically underestimate total benefits.
Additional Returns to Investing In Girls’ Education: Impact on Younger Sibling Human Capital
Javaeria Qureshi
Citation: Qureshi, Javaeria A. 2017. "Additional Returns to Investing In Girls’ Education: Impact on Younger Sibling Human Capital." The Economic Journal, 128: 3285-3319.
A key feature of education is that when you educate someone, they in turn can educate someone else. This is not a feature of, say, healthcare - if a doctor cures you, there is no guarantee that you can cure someone else! Following this idea of “shared literacy”, this paper uses the LEAPS data to estimate the impact of older sister’s schooling on younger brother’s learning and human capital.
Several studies demonstrate that investing in girls’ education has individual and collective benefits, including spillover effects to other members of the household. Most of the evidence has focused on the impact of maternal education on children with less attention given to potential spillovers across siblings. mother’s education onto the children. Older sisters often assume childcare and tutoring responsibilities for younger brothers and also serve as role models for them, making positive spillovers more likely.
The author argues that her results are causal - that is, they do not reflect the possibility that parents who value education highly will spend more money and time on both the elder girl and the younger brother. Specifically, using gender segregation of government schools in Pakistan, she is able to use the distance from the household to the closest girls’ school as an instrument for the older sister’s schooling. In the LEAPS data, an increase in distance to girls’ school of one kilometer is associated with an 8.2 percentage point (18%) reduction in enrolment and 0.45 fewer years of schooling completed for older girls.
Study Findings
An older sister’s schooling has a positive impact on younger brother’s learning
Evaluations may underestimate the benefits of girls’ education
An additional year of the oldest sister’s schooling increases the schooling of younger brother’s by 0.2 years, their likelihood of reading by 4.7 percentage points, writing by 4.3 percentage points, and ability to add and count by 3.4 and 3.2 percentage points respectively. These are quantitatively important effects - and similar in size to the impact of mother’s education.
Parents don’t capitalize on this potential positive impact
One important implication is that existing evaluations of educational interventions probably underestimate the benefits of investing in girl’s education as the spillover effects on siblings are not accounted for in the computation of overall benefit.
Parents do not internalize these spillover effects in making education decisions. That is, they do not take into account that an older sister can help the younger children and therefore should receive greater investments. This often means boys’ education is prioritized over that of their girl siblings.
About the Paper
Study Resources
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As a condition of use, please cite as: Qureshi, Javaeria A. 2017. "Additional Returns to Investing In Girls’ Education: Impact on Younger Sibling Human Capital." The Economic Journal, 128: 3285-3319.
IV Estimates of the Effects of the Oldest Sister’s Schooling on Younger Brother Human Capital: Only Core Conditioning Controls
IV Estimates of the Effects of Oldest Sister’s Schooling on Older Brother Human Capital: Falsification Test
Oldest sister's years of schooling and distance to girls' school