Published in
NYU Working Paper 5216, 2010
Abstract
We re-examine the recent empirical evidence suggesting no tradeoff between child quantity and quality. Motivated by the theoretical ambiguity about the magnitude and sign of the marginal effects on child quality of additional siblings, we depart from previous empirical studies in allowing an unrestricted relationship between family size and child outcome. We find that the conclusion of no family size effect is an artifact of a linear specification in family size, masking substantial marginal family size effects. This is true when we perform OLS estimation with controls for confounding characteristics like birth order, or instrument family size with twin births.