title: Strategic parenting, birth order, and school performance.
abstract: Fueled by new evidence, there has been renewed interest about the effects of birth order on human capital accumulation. The underlying causal mechanisms for such effects remain unsettled. We consider a model in which parents impose more stringent disciplinary environments in response to their earlier-born children's poor performance in school in order to deter such outcomes for their later-born offspring. We provide robust empirical evidence that school performance of children in the National Longitudinal Study Children (NLSY-C) declines with birth order as does the stringency of their parents' disciplinary restrictions. When asked how they will respond if a child brought home bad grades, parents state that they would be less likely to punish their later-born children. Taken together, these patterns are consistent with a reputation model of strategic parenting.
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics, Duke University, IZA & NBER, 213 Chapel Drive, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
authors.forename: V Joseph
authors.initials: VJ
authors.lastname: Hotz
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics, Washington University in St. Louis, 1 Brookings Dr., St. Louis, MO 63130, USA.
authors.forename: Juan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Pantano
keywords: Birth order; Grades; Parental rules; Parenting; School performance