Professor Zheng Lei's presentation on sex composition of sibling and education attainment in China
On April 14, 2014, professor Zheng, Lei, a visiting scholar from Beijing Normal University's Faculty of Education, delivered a presentation titled sex composition of sibling, intra-household resource allocation and educational attainment in China.
As introduced, the background of educational stratification by gender motivated his empirical study regarding the impact of sex composition on education attainment. Based on data from Chinese General Social Survey 2008, and for a sample of about 6000 individuals aged above 18 from all China’s provinces except Ningxia, Qinghai and Tibet, he tested four specific hypotheses using regression models:
(1) Sibling sex composition affect individual’s educational attainment, and such effect is gender asymmetric. This first hypothesis was confirmed. On the one hand, a negative effect of presence of brother in the sibship was found, where as there was a positive effect of the increase of percentage of girls in the sibship. At the same time, detrimental sibship only negatively affected female, while a favorable sibship both benefited male and female. He concluded that these findings are consistent to the budget constraint theory.
(2) Does sex composition of sibling effect (SSCE) vary by the SES and hukou status of family? According to his analysis, this was partially confirmed.
(3) Is SSCE waning as the improvement of mother’s status within household? This hypothesis was not confirmed. One explanation he provided is that educational level and/or occupational status may not be a sufficient measurement of mother’s status.
(4) He also found that SSCE is heterogeneous across cohorts.
A copy of his presentation can be downloaded from the link below.
http://www.tc.columbia.edu/i/a/document/31232_Zheng-sexcomposition.pdf
Published Wednesday, Jul. 16, 2014